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Show Congressmen Face Difficult Task In Voting to Increase Federal Taxes By Senator Arthur V. Wat-ins Washington: One of the most difficult tasks a Congressman has is that of voting to increase taxes. The Senate Finance Committee is now writing its version of the House approved 1951 tax bill. It appears that the tax increase will not now become effective until November 1 and that taxes will not be withheld until that date. I am concerned over a philosophy philo-sophy which has obtained widespread wide-spread belief in the country over the past twenty years. This is the belief that "the rich" can pay the bill. Certain people continue to encourage that philosophy and they continue to encourage class feeling by constant criticism of what thev call "the special priv ileged." I agree, however, that taxes should be made applicable as far as possible on the ability to pay. People do not like to read figures, fi-gures, and I realize that figures often can be used to tell any side of a story. I should like, however, to summarize the present pres-ent tax picture, using U. S. Treasury Trea-sury figures: The low income group representing repre-senting over 42 million people or 96.2 percent of all individual income in-come taxpayers, contributes over 13 billion dollars annually in taxes. The upper income group, earning more than $10,000, (3.8 percent of all taxpayers) contributes contri-butes over 10 billion dollars in taxes. Another major tax source is corporate income which contributes con-tributes more than 22 billion dollars dol-lars annually to pay the cost of government. The remainder of the federal income accrues from various forms of excise taxes. Since taxes of all kinds are now taking approximately 30 percent of our national income, it can readily be seen that the nation is fast reaching the point of no return. The low income group cannot stand more tax increases. While additional taxes will be imposed on all groups in the new tax bill, it is recognized that if those in the upper income brackets were to have all of their untaxed income in-come after the usual exemptions taken from them, the 20 billion dollars would pay less than 13 of the total budget request by President Truman for 1952. Corporation taxes, which also will be increased, could not meet the cost of government even if the government took all of their untaxed taxable Income which also amounts to slightly more than 20 billion dollars. Let's look at the Federal budget: bud-get: President Truman asked for over 771 billion dollars for the 1952 fiscal year. But he is requesting re-questing new obligational authority au-thority amounting to over 94 billion bil-lion dollars for the same period. This eventually must be paid, along with the present 257 billion national debt. Individual income taxpayers now pay the government almost 24 billion dollars a year in taxes. In addition, they pay another 8 billion in taxes in the form of excise levies of various sorts. Taxes alone will not stop inflation. in-flation. The government is going to have to cut expenditures. I hope the Congress will make some big reductions all along the line and this includes cuts in the defense budget. I don't want essential es-sential defense items cut, but I believe economies can be effected effect-ed and that non essentials can be reduced sufficiently to save the American taxpayers billions of dollars in defense appropriations alone. The danger in the whole argument argu-ment about who shall pay taxes and in what amount is that we may reach a point where we will destroy our system of free enterprise. en-terprise. In Britian today, with a 40 percent tax load, daily workers work-ers find it undersirable to work overtime because taxes deprive them of their extra earnings. Likewise with business, individuals indi-viduals will have no incentive left to enter business if taxes are going to deprive them of all gain. And most vicious of all is the fact that taxation by government can lead to Socialism. The citizen, citi-zen, because of taxes, cannot provide pro-vide for himself, so he expects the covernment to do it for him. |