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Show GENERAL HUGH S. JOHNSON Jour: I'NUd Falun. W "NU PLANES FOR THE ALLIES THE policy of the President to permit the allies to buy our most advanced type of military and naval planes is 100 per cent correct. A principal problem in our preparation prep-aration for defense is productive capacity. Time is "of the essence in war. Napoleon used to say: "I may lose a battle but I will never lose a minute and hence few wars." We have the best industrial plant in the world. But in our modern mod-ern system of manufacture, the best plant in the world can't get into production without first going through a slow and complicated effort ef-fort called "tooling-up." This means the arrangement of buildings and machine tools to provide pro-vide a continuous flow from one operation to another without backtracking back-tracking or lost motion. It means the making of the working points of those tools to insure absolute 1 vfT y "Once the original tooling is done fewer . . . experts are needed." uniformity in all the thousands of separate parts that go into the assembly of any such complex and wonderful thing as a modern war plane. The scarcity, due to the depression, depres-sion, of sufficiently skilled pattern and tool-makers is one of the great "bottle-necks" retarding production. Once the original tooling is done fewer of those experts are needed. Everybody who is old enough will remember that preparation to build the radically different successor to the old Model T tin Lizzie, paralyzed para-lyzed the production of even the great Ford plants for the better part of two years. It is believed in the motor industry that a single last minute change in arrangement and design cost the Ford company millions mil-lions of dollars and months of time. When this great preparation work is done, increase in speed and reduction re-duction in cost are very great. To put the American airplane industry in-dustry on this kind of mass production produc-tion basis would give us something that hasn't existed and, under conservative con-servative plans for our own equipment, equip-ment, might never have been completely com-pletely attained. But a billion dollars dol-lars worth of allies business coupled with our own requirements on basic designs identical with our own, will do exactly that This result of giving giv-ing the allies our most advanced designs is the most fortunate thing that could happen to us from the angle of our own defense. TAX ON MACHINES Senator O'Mahoney's proposal to tax machines has had a panning from every editorial that I read and I have to read a good many. One recurring note is that Joe hails from the great open spaces of Wyoming, which hints that he can't know anything about machinery. I happen to hail from the great open spaces of Oklahoma, but that isn't going to prevent me from horning in on this argument I enn't recommend the senator's bill. In the first place, although I have studied it. I don't understand it. I have a dim Idea that it taxes the producer who makes more than average use of machines and from the avails, (correct avails) subsidizes subsi-dizes the producer who uses less than the average machine power and hence employs more man power. I can't go for that. It is not tax-ing tax-ing for revenue. It is using the power to tax as a power to punish one group and reward another in proportion to their degree of departure depar-ture from or compliance with a government gov-ernment rule as to how they should run their business. It is both "punitive" "puni-tive" and "incentive" taxation and both are dangerous ground. Furthermore, it would be utterly impossible to apply. The labor-wage-element in the cost of various products varies from 10 per cent to 90 per cent and is largely caused luices entirely beyond the producer's pro-ducer's power to control. Nevertheless, there is something very valuable in part of what the f.cnal0' hf,s at back of his hought. We ought to re-examine this idea of financing all social legislation legis-lation by taxes on payrolls or give more thought to taxes on machines or machine hours. The rush toward machine producing produc-ing 8h 8,uay from employment sn t altogether caused by advances in science and invention. Every time a manufacturer installs a new machine operation displacing labor, he makes a certain logical calcu! |