Joyless Exercise on Form 1040

By Hugh Sidey

In a few days, with no little anguish, poets will become bookkeepers and chiropractors mathematicians. Tax time. America will produce a $402 billion miracle, the greatest amount of wealth ever peaceably signed over to the state.

About now the No. 1 citizen will have his forms on his desk. Accountant Bob Perry from Americus, Ga., and Atlanta Attorney Harvey Hill did the figuring. Jimmy Carter will cast a critical eye over the totals. Rosalynn will check the household items. When they sign their joint return, by some estimates, they could be paying far more than $100,000, registering some of the same wonder and pain that will accompany the other 87,999,999 returns.

What sets this tax season apart is the growing alarm in the nation at the size of the entire tax burden--about 34% of family incomes--including local property taxes, Social Security withholding and right on up to the federal bite, which is the biggest. While three out of four of those federal returns will ask for refunds, the hope of getting a little money back will often be dampened by the duty of computation ("My own return has driven me right up the tree," confesses a man at the U.S. Treasury).

Some of the politicians around Carter are concerned that if the people cast about for a tax villain, the President may be it, even though he is trying to make the federal burden faker and forms simpler. The average citizen's return doesn't bear Carter's name, but it is probably the most intimate communication that the voter has with the White House all year. Even with the improved short form it is a joyless exercise. So far, tax revolt is a local phenomenon. The IRS has received no more than the usual handful of worn shirts stuffed into tax-return envelopes along with wails of "Right off my back!" But polls report that while Americans are behind the federal system, they show signs of reaching their limits of tax tolerance.

At the Executive Office Building, one fellow who deals in tax matters dug out the line from Jean Baptiste Colbert, the tax collector for Louis XIV, who set the tone for all that followed him: "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing." So far, he reckons, Country Boy Carter has plucked well, though there surely is some hissing in the background.

The ghost of Beardsley Ruml is about town, both abused and praised. Ruml was a huge man of equally large intellect, who was treasurer of Macy's, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and Government brain-truster for Hoover and Roosevelt. He propounded a range of ideas, including the pay-as-you-go tax system. Its salient characteristic was the anesthetized paycheck, near painless extraction of dollars. Nothing less could have been expected from the cultivated Ruml, who loved Brahms and Bach and preceded his magnificent lunches with a touch of dry sherry taken to announce to his stomach that a Manhattan would follow immediately and other delights right behind. "I spent many years getting into condition for a sedentary life and, having got into condition, I never broke training," he once explained. In tax matters, too, he took the path of least resistance. At Treasury, which gets all that money the Ruml system yields, they hail him as the fellow who made big expensive Government possible. Critics suggest that the Ruml scheme and the golden river it produces have caused federal elephantiasis, which may yet crush us.

On Capitol Hill they are waiting for the April wisdom from Chairman Long, an event of no small magnitude to those who know how tax bills are created. The chairman is Louisiana's Russell Long, the ringmaster of the Senate's Finance Committee. He may be hard put to improve on the commandment he handed down last year about his plans for the tax system. "You have to tighten up on the loose ends and loosen up on the tight ends," he said. That may not help much on this year's 1040, but it surely is the tax road to the future.

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