Fish for the Seals

Unpocketing the 1943 tax bill chunk by chunk, the House Ways & Means Committee emerged from secret sessions twice last week. Each time the committee threw a few fish to the tax-paying seals. To the little fellow it tossed a slight reduction in the stiff surtaxes previously proposed by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau (they are still double or more last year's on incomes up to $4,000). Lobbed to the big fellow was a liberalization of the capital-gains tax, making it easier to take full account of losses over several years.

The work went on. The basic income-tax rate was fixed at 6% and the surtax range from 12% to 81%. Next big chore: the Treasury proposed a 10% withholding tax, to be extracted from payrolls monthly, making taxpaying as "painless as possible." The painlessness was relative. If the withholding tax is passed, the man whose income tax is doubled next year will find 10% more of his income going to pay taxes that he ordinarily would not need to fork out till 1944. However, the job of administration (falling on all employers, from mammoth corporations down to the housewife with a maid earning more than $11 a week) would be fabulous to the point of fantasy.

One fact stood in the spotlight: the committee is still $1 1/2 billions short of the Treasury's $8,800,000,000 revenue goal. One thing was certain: the seals had been chucked their last piece of fish for the duration. And in the wings, an emergency act waited its cue if the bill went sour: the sales-taxers were ready to come yodeling in.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.