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Show SLlr : -' -Kb. 1 : 4lM:Mml: 1 i: t i Released by Western Newspaper Union. HIDDEN TAXES AND WASTE IN GOVERNMENT ; WHEN WE BUY cigarettes, cigars, ci-gars, tobacco, playing cards, wines and liquors, if any, we know there is a tax included in the price wo pay because of the internal revenue stamp on each package. But there are other taxes we pay on these' things and on all other tilings we buy. They are referred to as hidden hid-den taxes and they include taxes levied by municipalities, counties, school districts, states and the federal fed-eral government. It is by no means the tax bill we receive that represents the taxes we pay. These hidden taxes that are a portion of the price of every commodity we buy represent the taxes paid directly by all those who produce the things we buy. They' are passed along to the consumer as a part of the price he pays. If that were not done all industry would soon be bankrupt and we would have industrial chaos. Taxes are a part of the cost of production, just as much as is labor or materials materi-als or power. 'A loaf of bread offers a simple illustration. il-lustration. The farmer raises wheat and must sell it at a profit if he is to continue producing wheat. An item of the cost of production is the taxes he pays on his farm. If his taxes are $100 and his only production pro-duction has been 1,000 bushels of wheat, the tax item amounts to 10 cents a bushel. That must be, and is, passed along to the man who buys the wheat. The elevator operator buys the wheat and pays the farmer's taxes.' He sells the wheat to the miller at a price that includes the farmer's taxes with the addition of a share of the taxes of the elevator operator. It goes on from the miller to the wholesaler, the retailer, the baker. Each one adds a bit of taxes. By the time a bushel of wheat has reached the consumer in the form of bread it is possible there may have been added 25 cents, or more, to the actual cost of the wheat. That 25 cents becomes a part of the price of the bread made from that bushel of wheat and the consumer pays it. Competent tax analysts estimate that from 20 to 30 per cent of the price of a loaf of bread reprents t -the taxes the consumer pa,j for-those for-those who produced the wheat and converted it from grain to bread. That is as it always has been,' and must continue to be, if American Ameri-can industry is to continue to operate. oper-ate. When the tax fixing bodies, local, lo-cal, state or national, collect a high tax rate from the industrial corporations, corpo-rations, they are not soaking such corporations, they are soaking us, the consumers. When the taxes on anything we buy commodities, transportation, gas or electricity are increased, the price we pay for the product is, and must be, increased. in-creased. When taxes go down we get more for our money. We, the consumers, have a very definite interest in government, local, lo-cal, state and national, economics. We, in the end, must pay the cost of government waste and extravagance. extrava-gance. It is right that we do so, if anybody must pay, but it is unfair when those who fix the taxes try to fool us into believing that we do not contribute to the tax collector- SUBSIDIES AND BUREAUCRATS OPA WAS CREATED for the purpose pur-pose of controlling distribution, price and consumption of commodi- ties used by the civilian population on the home front. It has full authority to specify the amount of any commodity that may be used by the civilian population. Through the point rationing system it regulates regu-lates the amount of each commodity each civilian may have. It is authorized author-ized to, and does, fix prices that may be charged for commodities by the producer, the processor, the manufacturer, the wholesaler and the retailer. It tells the consumer what he is to pay for any commodity com-modity on which OPA feels it should, and does, set a price. These things being true, why does any failure to pay subsidies threaten us with runaway, inflationary prices on food products? When the farmer, farm-er, the processor, the wholesaler, the retailer are told at what price they can sell and the consumer, is told at what price he may buy, where does the threat of runaway prices come in? The payment of subsidies, it would seem, provides but another means by which Washington bureaucrats may tell American farmers what to raise and when and how. The farmers farm-ers are to be commended for their opposition. ONE POINT about farm subsidies that seems to have been overlooked: The administering of them would provide jobs for several thousand additional federal government employees. em-ployees. THE ONE OBSTACLE THE FARMER has so far been successful in surmounting is the racketeering labor leader who has attempted an invasion of the farm field. The racketeer's difficulty is in finding mass elements with which he can deal. |
