OCR Text |
Show (Released by Weitern Newspaper Union.) CONTRASTING OUR TAXES WITH ENGLISH SYSTEM THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT wants jobs for its people; it wants Industry to produce merchandise for export so it may have credits abroad against which to purchase food, raw materials and war equipment, equip-ment, and it wants cargoes for its ships. To encourage industry, it levies low taxes on corporations and high taxes on the individual, including in-cluding those whose revenue com s as dividends from corporations. In this country. Secretary Mor-genthau Mor-genthau has advocated confiscation of all corporation profits of mure than 6 per cent on the invested capi-tal. capi-tal. A Minneapolis corporation with an invested capital of $3,496,0!i0 earned and paid out in dividends in 1940 a total of $1,140,000. Under the 1940 law, it paid in taxes a total of $273,600. Under the law as pro-posed pro-posed by Mr. Morgenthau. it would pay $930,240. If that company were operating In England, with the same amount of invested capital and the same earnings, earn-ings, it would pay at the present time a tax of only $57,000. But in England each stockholder would have paid a tax on what he received as a dividend. That tax would have been deducted from his dividend check and would have been the same per share whether the stockholder stock-holder owned one or many shares. The individual pays instead of the corporation. The individual knows definitely how much tax he pays. Directly or indirectly, we Americans Ameri-cans own our American corporations. corpora-tions. We provide the capital invested in-vested in the tools with which industry in-dustry operates. The taxes they pay is paid with our money, but we are not supposed to know that Figured on either a per capita or dollars earned basis, we pay a higher tax than is paid by the English people and that is another thing we are not supposed to know. To me it seems the English way is the more honest and more conducive con-ducive to national welfare. PRICE RISES FAST RECENTLY a woman went into a Chicago store to look at house dresses. She found one that suited, but wished to look elsewhere before buying. At another store she found the same dress, but the price was some 10 per cent higher. She hurried hur-ried back to the clerk who had shown her the dress at the first j store, saying she would take the i dress she had looked at but a few j minutes before. ; "It will be about an hour before i I can sell you that dress now," said the clerk. "And then the price will be higher. All dresses in that line have been taken away for today's mark-up." That is what is happening practically prac-tically every day in the great mercantile mer-cantile establishments of the cities. The prices go up while you wait Is that an evidence of inflation? UNION LABOR LEADERS will not be satisfied until every man and woman who works pays a union for the privilege of working. 'PORK BARREL' OF YESTERYEAR AND TODAY IT WAS NOT so long ago. as time is measured, that I, as a boy, lis- ' tened to the discussions of governmental govern-mental affairs by the farmers and townspeople as they sat around the stove in the general store in the Iowa village in which I lived. The most frequently discussed subject was the "pork barrel," the rivers and harbors and public works appropriations ap-propriations made by congress. Well do I remember an item of ' $10,000 in one of those appropriations appropria-tions for deepening the channel of the Des Moines river where it ran through our village. It was acclaimed ac-claimed as wise legislation, hut other items for equally unimportant projects were severely condemned. They did not mean additional dollars dol-lars to be spent locally. What was true of the Americnn people in those days is still true. We look at the activities of government gov-ernment from a selfish viewpoint. 1 We approve of any activity that means a profit or benefit to any of us as individuals or to our locality, regardless of its need or value to the nation. Farmers and town people are s'ill discussing governmental activities and expenditures in thousands of American villages. Where appropriation appro-priation items were once stated in terms of thousands of dollars, and totals in limited millions, the individual indi-vidual items are now in terms of millions and the totals in billions. The figures are too great for those rural critics to comprehend. They cannot visualize such sums, but they are not alone in that Their representatives repre-sentatives in congress, the men who vote for such expenditures, have no realization of what a billion dollars mean. If we, their constituents, could appreciate Just what such appropriations ap-propriations mean to each of us, the discussions of former days would be riots of today. It may be well for . us that we do not know. The "pork barrel" of yesteryear has become a great vat of today. j i |