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Show THE AMERICAN WAY ;; . 'i Taxes Higher " In England v ! pr George Peck f f., tax loads carried by the citizen-of citizen-of the two countries, the Confer ence board points out that befor the war the British Were ace tomed to a heavier tax load than we had to bear. However tha relative increase in tax payment! has been strikingly similar each country became more more deeply involved in the w,r Thus in the first year of the con flict, 31 per cent of the inconl of the United Kingdom went f r taxes, 38 per cent in the second year, and 40 per cent in the third year. In our country 27 per cent was absorbed by taxes in our fire year of the war, and the share m our second year may approach 33 per cent. With the same rela ,tive rate of increase as in Brit ain 35 per cent of our incorne would go for taxes in 1943 against the third the government is expected to take during the year. There is a certain amount of comfort to be derived in knowing that enormous as our taxes are now and with the prospect that they will become even more severe, se-vere, that our British cousins suffer from a worse case of "taxitis" than ourselves. 1 . Comparisons may be odious, I but the fact remains that "In the Kingdom of the Blind, the One-Eyed One-Eyed Man is King." XAU of US' have our troubles but no matter how dire our distress, ve can, if we look about us, always find others whose misfortunes by comparison, com-parison, make ours pale into mere insignificance. Therefore, when one is inclined to self-pity and self-commiseration, self-commiseration, solace oft can be found in comparing one's afflictions afflic-tions with those of others who have even greater cause for com. plaint. We Americans are grumbling at the back-breaking taxes which are now being levied upon us. No patriotic American, however, is begrudging one single penny that is being" wisely and carefully expended ex-pended to bring about a speedy victory over the Nazi gangsters and their Japanese partners in crime. We have every right, however, how-ever, to object to governmental expenditure of every unnecessary dollar. In view of the billions of dollars which MUST be spent to defeat those who would destroy the American Way, .we deprecate the- waste 61 public funds of which we see all too much evidence. But the purpose of this editorial editor-ial is not to scold a profligate and wasteful administration which has piled bureau upon bureau, many of them non-essential and over-lapping; and which has grossly overstaffed those tax-eating tax-eating monsters. Rather, its purport pur-port is to show that bad as its our tax impost, it is not nearly so severe as that of one of our protagonists in the struggle against the totalitarian powers. According to the Division of Industrial In-dustrial Economics of the National Nation-al - Industrial Conference board, Britons paid out 40 cents of every ev-ery dollar of national income for taxes in 1942, while we Americans paid out only 27 cents. If we had paid out as large a share of our national income in taxes as the British did last year, our total tax bill would have been boosted 17 billion dollars,, or half again as ' much "k it- actually totaled.' ' " J These figures are based on estimates es-timates made according to the British method of computing national na-tional income which would place our total income, for 1942 at 128 billion dollars, or about $950 per capita. The British per capita income in-come was slightly over $600. Our taxes amounted to $250 per capita last year. To have matched the British taxpayers performance of 40 per cent of income, we would have had to pay out $375 per capita. In comparing the respective |