Willkie calls for high taxes to pay for war
Lower living standard must be accepted, candidate says
New York (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said last night that Americans must submit to “ruthless” taxation and lower their standard of living or else “we shall lose in debt the victory we have gained in blood.”
Predicting a post-war public debt of more than $300 billion at an interest cost of $6 billion a year, Mr. Willkie told a meeting in the New York Times hall that:
We should pay now for as much of the war as we possibly can.
He assailed the administration’s tax program as “unrealistic” and said President Roosevelt’s request for more than $10 billion in new taxes should be doubled.
He said:
Every dollar of war cost that we pass on to the future thins the financial bloodstream of the future.
There is only one principle to apply to war taxation, and that is a hard principle; we must tax to the limit every dollar, corporate and individual, that is capable of bearing a tax, particularly those corporate and individual earnings which are created by the war itself. That limit is reached only when the war effort itself is threatened. All else must be sacrificed and all must share the sacrifice to the bone.
During a question-and-answer period, Mr. Willkie reiterated his demand for close international cooperation in boundary disputes such as the present Polish-Soviet one.
Wants Soviet friendship
He said:
Let’s still try to find a method of cooperation because millions of lives are involved in our finding it.
The 1940 Republican candidate, who leaves Friday on a speaking tour of Western states in connection with the 1944 campaign, criticized “so-called political experts” who contend that the American people “will never stand for a tough tax program.”
He said:
Give the people an understanding of the issues involved and they will do their duty by their country, however incredibly painful it may be.