Tax Time

To confirm the poet's choice of April as the crudest month, 60 million Americans have by this week signed their 1954 income-tax forms. Most of them signed away more than they paid during the year for bread or meat, or gave to charity, or lost in gambling, or have any reasonable hope of saving this year.

They did this, wonderful to tell, without riots of protest or direct coercion of the bastinado or bayonet kind. In the free U.S., anybody can speak his mind against the income tax. Few spoke loud enough to be heard.

Even the old March 15 jokes failed to carry over to the new deadline of April 15. Back in the 1930s, when Actress Carole Lombard, following the lead of a Supreme Court justice, said that she liked to pay taxes, there was an almost audible national gasp. But familiarity breeds consent. It has become more and more unfashionable to criticize the income-tax level. A psychology professor, Richard J. Dowling of Holy Cross College, has gone farther than Miss Lombard or Justice Holmes; they had merely expressed a personal pleasure in paying taxes. Dowling raised it to a maturity rite by pronouncing as follows: "Repugnance to tax collectors is a persistent infantilism."

After that, the reluctant taxpayer can only hitch up his rompers and turn John

Hampden's picture to the wall. The political history of Western civilization used to be considered as largely a matter of resistance to taxes. But now old Wat Tyler and Sam Adams go back to their cribs while the mature American faces taxes with a confident smile.

Who Pays What? But even in this mirage of the millennium a serpent slinks. There is discontent--of a kind most interesting to moralists--about the income tax. Internal Revenue Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews, a thoughtful man, has put it well. Asked if people really objected to paying taxes, he said that they did not, so long as they thought they were treated fairly in relation to other taxpayers.

This puts the Government in the position of being able to exploit the taxpayers' envy of each other. No longer do the taxpayers ask the unifying question: How much should we pay? They ask: Who should pay what? All modern tax debates, including the one just concluded, turn on this point. And the new U.S. tax law reflects the principle of envy. If the new long form for computing taxes is even more complex than the old, it should not be blamed upon bureaucratic obscurantism; it rises from the enormous pressure from taxpayer groups to correct particular inequities. Hard cases make bad law. Year by year the fungus of hard cases (working mother, annuitants, double-taxed dividend recipients) encrusts the incoming tax and leads the Government against its will deeper and deeper into the private lives of its citizens.

This has been the steady trend for two generations. Can a countertrend be detected? Not in the expectable places. A recent issue of a weekly business newsletter said that its authors had made the rounds of Washington lobbyists in an effort to find where the pressures were on taxes. The common denominator of lobby policy: opposition to any reduction in the personal income tax. The reason: the lobbyists assume that any cut in the personal income tax would be replaced by higher taxes on business.

Something Wrong? In the absence of sharp, organized opposition, the U.S. income tax remains a marvel of invulnerability, unique in the long and often bitter history of taxation. Never was so much collected from so many with so little protest.

But there is a chance that even the income tax is subject to the change that affects all things terrestrial. A countertrend is building up--in the last place to look for it.

Treasury officials, looking ahead, suspect that the day will come when a large part of the personal income tax will be replaced by transaction or value-added taxes. Coleman Andrews worries over the enormous machinery required for fair, efficient enforcement of the present law. He notes that 12 million taxpayers last year (and probably 15 million this year) sought help from his office in filling out their forms. Andrews says: "There is something wrong with any law that causes that many people to quit their jobs and spend a day trying to find out how to comply." Something is also wrong, he thinks, when it takes 51,000 people to see that the taxpayers comply.

Other Treasury officials worry about the impact of present income-tax levels on the structure of U.S. society, which they regard as much more serious than the difficulties of administration. One secondary effect of progressive income-tax rates was supposed to be the leveling down of great fortunes. This did not happen. There are scores of millionaires in the U.S. today for every one at the time the income tax was started in 1914. But a lot of unexpected secondary effects appeared--the expense-account society, for instance. Among some Washington tax theorists, there is talk of a basic survey of the whole tax structure.

If there is ever a substantial cut in the personal income tax, it is likely to come, not because of resistance by the payers, but because of concern on the part of the collectors. That never happened before, but the U.S. is a great country for firsts.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer, seeking to avoid Professor Bowling's tag of infantilism, will take what comfort and maturity he can find from the late Oliver Wendell Holmes's remark that "taxes are what we pay for civilized society." In the contemporary scene purchasable civilization means, mostly, defense against the Communist world revolution. The freedom to be defended is priceless, which is one of the reasons why argument about the price has abated.

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