U.S. outlines plan to boost all taxation
Eccles advocates payroll levy, foresees income assessment increase
Washington, Feb. 13 (UP) –
The administration, searching for annual war revenue of $27 billion, today offered a plan for increasing the taxes of everyone except the very poor whose earnings:
…are no more than enough to maintain health and morale.
The financing program, outlined by Chairman Marriner S. Eccles of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, called for:
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Reduction of personal exemptions, and “great increases” in individual income tax rates.
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Steep increases in corporation taxes, especially excess profits levies.
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Addition of a withholding tax to collect part of individual income taxes at the source, or from pay envelopes.
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Extension of excise taxes to “an increasing number of articles.”
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Closing of “glaring loopholes” in tax laws.
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Government borrowing from “current incomes of individuals and corporations.”
He opposed a general sales tax, which has gained more Congressional support than the withholding levy.
This taxation program, which Mr. Eccles explained last night in a radio broadcast from New York, generally follows Treasury proposals.
Hearings incoming
Treasury and Congressional tax experts have been working together in an effort to reach an agreement on the huge revenue program. But it is doubtful whether the House Ways and Means Committee will begin hearing before March.
To meet current costs of the war, the Treasury today offered for sale $1.5 billion of 13-year, 2.25% bonds. The issue will push the national debt to $62 billion.
To finance the war – which will cost an estimated $56 billion during the fiscal year beginning next July 1 – Mr. Eccles said:
Civilian buying must be reduced to fit the diminishing supply of goods and services available for civilian consumption.
Survival at stake
Civilians, he added:
…would readily accept much high taxes and turn… savings over to the government by purchasing defense bonds.
…if they realized their:
…very survival as a nation is at stake.
Increased taxes and government borrowing from current income, rather than from savings or bank reserves, are necessary to avoid a “ruinous inflation,” he said.
He asserted that the standard of living of most civilians:
…must be drastically reduced in order to make the supreme effort that alone will assure victory.
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORTLAND, Oregon – Since the WPA always has captivated me as a phenomenon, a social force, a doer of good deeds, and a possible haven for myself in some future private storm, I dropped around today to see what the WPA was doing for its country now.
Or more specifically, to see what the Art Project under WPA was doing, I have been curious about how sculpture and handweaving and murals could help save America from the Japs.
Well, they’re helping all right. The Art Project of Oregon’s WPA is hard at work on defense. In fact it’s doing nothing else. It isn’t making shells or planes – but it’s making the men happy who shoot the shells and pilot the planes.
The Art Project, you might say, has gone into the business of making life bearable for some of our armed forces. At the moment it is head over heels furnishing and decorating the new Tongue Point Naval Air Station.
That’s all said in a few words, and yet it’s a colossal job. The Art Project has made the furniture (and boy you should see it!) for all the public and many of the private rooms – 280 pieces, chairs, tables, beds, lamps, ash trays, even a crap table.
It has made all the drapes. It has furnished the pictures and murals and the pretty pottery that sits around on tables – 76 separate pieces, from oil paintings to huge glass mosaics.
You know, if you’ve ever been around one, how nicely the quarters at a Naval Air Station are fixed up. Well, I imagine Tongue Point will be the envy of the whole Navy.
$20,000 job done for $7000
You might ask why the Navy, in a time of urgency like this, has to help keep WPA going by having it do this work. Why not just go to a store and buy the stuff?
The answer is simple – the Oregon Art Projects can do this job more artistically, and far more cheaply, than it could be done any other way right now. Why, for $7000 the Government is getting at Tongue Point what would cost $20,000 anywhere else. That’s the answer.
Oregon’s Art Project is unique. No other state has put its art craftsmanship to such practical use. They’ve really created a renaissance out here.
The Art Project didn’t just sew a little and hold water-color classes and model a few urns for exhibits around the country. For at least five years it has been actually creating things – unusual, tasteful and practical things – for people to use.
The Art Project fished out carpenters from the WPA rolls, and made delicate cabinetmakers out of them. It took foundry workers and trained them into ironwork-Cellinis. It took guys like me whose fingers were all thumbs, and made fine upholsterers of them. It took ordinary housewives and set them to weaving unusual drapes and upholstering material.
Then with all this newly developed talent fit started making things that were both useful and beautiful. What it did was the opposite of leaf-raking.
Decorated medical school
It built and furnished Timberline Lodge. It decorated the University of Oregon’s medical school. It furnished – in Oregon’s native myrtlewood – the lodge at Siver Creek Falls state park. It did the Bend County courthouse, and dozens of libraries and schools.
It furnished and decorated the quarters of an Army Engineers outfit here in Portland, and did some decorative work at the Air Base. It is just winding up a beautiful job of refurnishing the governor’s mansion at Juneau, Alaska.
Yes, what it has done is practical, and it has made a name for itself. Five years ago it had to beg for projects. Today it is so flooded with requests that it has a hard time choosing which to do, for it can do only a few.
For now, it’s getting shorthanded, and of course that’s the way it should be. The majority of the skilled workers have left to take jobs in defense industry.
The number of people employed on the Art Project has dropped by one-third – and the two-thirds remaining are not the same people who were working a year ago, but are green hands pulled off the regular WPA rolls and trained to this specialized work.
If the war goes long enough, the Project visualizes the day when it will fold up altogether because there’ll no longer be anybody to do the work – everybody will be in actual defense work. That would be a fitting climax to a job spectacularly well done.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
CHICAGO – Last September, when the AFL was holding its annual hoodlums’ old home week or national convention in Seattle, John Boettiger, President Roosevelt’s son-in-law, who is editor of The Seattle Post Intelligencer, ran an editorial note apologizing to the gorillas for printing these dispatches. But he said he believed in a free press even to the extent of running opinions with which he wholly disagreed and made himself out quite a fine, ethical fellow while, incidentally, assuaging the hurts of the union Brown Shirts who run Seattle as a Fascist-Bolshevist city.
Well, I am fond of repartee, myself, so I will go back to the time when Mr. B. was covering the White House in the first Roosevelt term. He was not yet the President’s son-in-law but he was parking his dogs under the White House table every night and everyone understood that there would be chimes when the respective divorces of the parties concerned came through.
Needled President with heckling
So it was very amusing at the President’s press conferences, to see John standing there, strictly dead-pan, and hear him needing the President with heckle-stuff and read his pieces warming his countrymen of a conspiracy, led by the man who was about to become his father-in-law, to collectivize the whole nation and muzzle the press and always under his own name which meant that he either subscribed to these sentiments himself or was the sort of man who would sing any old song for a moderate salary, as Virginio Gayda chips for Mussolini.
I am a trifle tardy on the up-take only because this has been my first opportunity to check John’s writings, done in the role of an informed and honest man, in The Tribune files; but I can tell you now that you can finally mark off that old one about the leopard’s spots. That one ain’t so. The spots can change and change into a stripe, too.
It was in 1934 that John was almost alarmed about a dark conspiracy to make this country over by stealth into an imitation of the Soviet. Moley and Tugwell were the devils in his book but he was very suspicious of the whole Professariat, as he called the Brain Trust, and, on his own hook, pointed out that the emblem of the TVA was a clenched fist grasping some lightning, which he likened to a Communist sign.
He detected an underhanded attempt to circumvent the Constitution in the rewriting of the AAA, dug up and exploited a deleted passage from a book by Henry Wallace in which Wallace had an oblique good word to say for Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini, and threw into prominence an idea then being toyed with by the Brain Trust, that after taxation had reached parity with the profits of a private business, the business would surrender and the Government would take it over.
The obvious suggestion was that the Brain Trust would raise taxes to parity and that all business gradually would be gathered into the hands of the State. And he was always in a high dither about the plot to gag the press by controls and pressure. He didn’t trust that sinister New Deal any whatever, during his sparking days in Washington when he was working for R. R. McCormick of The Chicago Tribune.
It’s all there for any man to see
But we can’t very well suspect that he was in receipt of any brass checks from his boss along with his pay because that would call for a conclusion, as the shysters say. When a journalist puts his name over his stuff, it means in our business and to the public that he pledges his honor and professional integrity that such are his own, independent opinions, not his boss’.
Mr. Boettiger and the President’s daughter were wed and, after a brief layover at Will Hays’ emergency landing field where the movie industry, so beholden to official power, provides food and shelter for some politicians and writers who get off course or unavoidably run out of gas, he was made editor of The Seattle P.-I., a Hearst paper, with a nice job for a wife. a newspaper novice, at a salary such as few newspaper girls of long experience and outstanding ability ever achieve.
But it could not have been his political opinions, so oft and forcefully expressed in The Chicago Tribune, although it might have been his versatility, which appealed to Mr. Hearst, himself a versatile man, for Mr. Boettiger, meanwhile, had become a loyal and aggressive New Dealer. Today he could tear off his own hide in reply to the opinions uttered under his own good name and on his honor in 1934.
So I guess we know what his ethics and principles are. He told the wide world and it is all there for any man to see unless, some day, in fulfiliment of the dark prophecy which he gave us then, the new order should purge the files here as in Italy and Germany.
Clapper: We won’t lose
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – As an academic statement of the theoretical possibilities, it is accurate, I suppose, to say that we can lose the war.
But the realistic fact is that we won’t lose the war.
First, I know we won’t lose the war when I see something like the Chrysler tank arsenal and know that the same miracle of war production is being wrought over and over again in many parts of the country. I know it is a mathematical certainty that we shall far outdo the Axis.
Second, do you know any American who is ready to give up until the war is won! Everything I hear is the other way. We heard it from the grassroots again when Alf Landon reported that out in the Kansas country they had been pretty much against the war but now would settle for nothing short of victory.
Run of bad news is not over yet
Third, Gen. MacArthur and his men, and the men at Wake Island have set an example of courageous and skillful fighting that will be the pattern of American fighting and its inspiration throughout this war. All American fighting forces will make it their business to live up to the heroic level which has been set in these opening engagements.
Those three circumstances alone point with certainty to victory.
You can ring all the changes on the disaster that has reached its climax at Singapore. You can paint a black picture, without exaggeration, of the failures which made that possible. You can point to the train of blows likely still to follow as a result of it. Nobody can be blind to them. Our run of bad news is not over yet.
But this war is going on. It is going on until the other side is licked. The longer it goes on, the closer the day of inevitable defeat for Germany and Japan.
Because the longer the war goes on, the more telling will be the blows from this fresh country against the weary, thinly spread spider web of the Axis. Ford’s Willow Run bomber plant will, a few months hence, be turning out four-motor, long-range bombers one an hour. That is one plant out of several. Where in the whole world are new ships being built in such volume as here? American industry is going to win this war because it can be and is becoming big enough to win it – when its weapons are put into the hands of men like those of Gen. MacArthur.
Paying the price of a good neighbor
Our pessimism now comes because we forget the time factor. If we had begun when Germany and Japan began, and had put into our effort only part of the effort they put forth, our planes rather than theirs would be clouding the skies. It would be our tanks rolling through the jungles, our ships swinging into the docks loaded with reinforcements.
We started late. That’s the trouble. We didn’t realize what kind of wolves were prowling in the woods until they came out at us.
We should have known. We have only the excuse that we credited Germany and Japan with higher instincts than they proved to have. In that respect, we were a little sappy on the idealistic side.
For the time being, we are paying the price of having tried to be a good neighbor. They knocked our windows out.
But no self-flagellation is called for. We are not the kind of people to waste much time in morbid introspection. The work is going on. Time-saving short cuts are being introduced at a thousand points in the production work.
War now moves with great speed over distances that once seemed fantastic. Japan is winning her victories three thousand miles from home. What she has been able to do with little so far from home, we can do with much, which we shall have as surely as the clock goes around. We are going to have it because we are making good use of our time, as everyone who has taken a look around industry agrees.
Maj. Williams: A master plan
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
The above isn’t some newfangled slogan.
It’s the formula for the only way we can lick Japan.
People have always needed a specific purpose and that purpose had to be kept squarely in their minds day in and day out. There’s no record of cute little phrases being used among the Romans in the days before their chief Mediterranean enemy, Carthage, was finally destroyed. No indeed, the elder Cato – stern, determined leader of the Roman people – sold them one single idea, one purpose, and kept hammering at them until it became part of their national psychology. He kept pumping it into them until that specific purpose became part of their blood. “Carthage must be destroyed,” he kept saying. Rome finally did destroy Carthage, and the consolidation of that purpose to destroy Carthage was the motivating inspiration which kept the Romans at the grim job until they did destroy Carthage.
There’s nothing original in our adaptation of that self-same, old Roman formula for consolidation of national purpose, except in our case it means the steady, unwavering selection of a modern way to lick Japan – the only way we are going to lick Japan. It means the awakening of the American people to the blunt realization that if we run a compromise war against Japan – a sort of warship, infantry, and air force war against that nation – we’ll stand a darn good chance of facing a 10-year job. We’ve got to get and consolidate land bases in Asia before we can strike at Japan proper with the weapon that has busted hell out of the one-time strongest warship fleet in the world (British), destroyed the naval bases of that fleet or rendered them unusable, destroyed the impregnable Maginot Line, and routed armies. It appears obvious that with the major Japanese effort extending farther and farther southeastward, the primary bases we can grab and hold will be too far from Japan proper to do us any more good than Hawaii.
Java is important
On the other hand (and airmen of England as well as this country long since counted Singapore out in a modern air war), the real stand of the British, Dutch, and American forces in that Far Eastern war will be in Java. What the British obviously have lacked and still lack in the way of realistic vision and industry to implement that vision, the Dutch have in abundance. To an airman’s way of thinking, Java will prove to be a much harder nut to crack than Singapore. Java is evidently all set and equipped to fight a true hit and-run war with fast torpedo boats (small naval craft are trumps in this war because they can hit and run) and a vast network of airdromes from which to operate their variegated British, Dutch, and American planes.
Singapore was built by the men who had this war estimated wrong from the start, with their big guns and warships. Every one of those great, 18-inch guns at Singapore is a monument to the stupidity of the Brass Hats who planted them there and the Parliament that approved the planting. Just think of a great gaping cannon, its muzzle smokeless and cool while swarms of bombers flit overhead, releasing missiles that will turn these 18-inch monsters of another age upside down and destroy their foundations.
Java, on the other hand, is all set and fairly well equipped to fight hit-and-run attackers with hit-and-run weapons – torpedo boats and planes. And if Java is the halting line of Jap expansion toward the southeast, necessitating every ounce of Jap effort and resources in that direction, isn’t that all the more reason for launching an attack against the Jap homeland through and along the Aleutian Peninsula and its stepping-stone islands to the Asiatic Continent?
Phrase is a plan
Nothing has been done yet about action. Japan may be held at Java, but would you like the prospect of seeing your forces, along with what the British will provide for the job, working from island to island all the way to the Asiatic Continent and recapturing the Philippines, thence to Formosa, and from there battering Japan proper from that point? No, indeed. “Japan must be bombed to defeat” means a purpose and a plan. It means that we are going to try to do a modern job of war according to the old rule books that should have been burned as soon as the modern crop of ersatz military experts and commentators had read them, or do the job the modern way.
British airmen had warned and pleaded with political, military, and naval Brass Hats of England, “Build airpower and bomb Germany in the next war.” The Brass Hats didn’t and wouldn’t listen. If they had listened, Germany would have been licked to a frazzle long ago.
No, Japan must be bombed to defeat resolves itself into a challenging denial of the Brass Hats to do anything they like and make all the mistakes they like – or fighting a type of war we can be sure of winning – via Alaska with bombers against Japan.
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
