Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 11 February 1938 — Page 16
s v =
The Indianapolis Times
(A SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPER)
ROY W. HOWARD LUDWELL DENNY MARK FERREE President Editor Business Manager
Price in Marion County, 3 cents a copy; delivered by carrier, 12 cents a2 week. *
Owned and published daily (except Sunday) by The Indianapolis Times Publishing Co. 214 W. Maryland St. Mail subscription rates in Indiana, $3 a year; outside of Indiana, 65 cents a month.
> RlIley 5551
Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way
Member of United Press, Scripps - Howard Newspaper Alliance, NEA Service, and Audit Bureau of Circulations.
FRIDAY, FEB. 11, 1938
$250,000,000 MORE EYOND doubt Congress will vote the $250,000,000 asked by President Roosevelt yesterday for work relief. The amount is too small, if anything, for the need. Best available estimates, Mr. Roosevelt said, are that three million private jobs have folded up in the last three months. But WPA has expanded its rolls by less than
half a million, and is employing altogether only 1,950,000 people. The extra $250,000,000 will keep the present number on the rolls through June and provide ‘‘a reasonable meaure”’ of relief for other needy victims of recent unem-
ployment. How much is “a reasonable measure”? Not very much. At best, the new money will finance a few hundred thousand new WPA jobs. For upward of two million of the newly unemployed it will do nothing. These two million or more, plus nobody knows how many other men and women who were jobless before the big dip but who were left out of WPA, will continue to depend on such local direct relief as they can get. In many hard-hit industrial cities that is very little; in some it is practically nothing. For the local governments are overtaxed to provide for the unemployable needy—the task assigned to them when the Government decided to confine Federal relief to the employables.
The truth seems to be this: The need for unemployment relief is almost if not quite as great as two years ago, when WPA and other Federal work-relief agencies were employing more than three and a quarter million people. Sev~ eral times $250,000,000 would be needed to increase the WPA load to its 1936 size. And Mr. Roosevelt has vehemently opposed a Federal return to the cheaper method of direct relief.
So, as we see it, Congress has no choice but to vote the $250,000,000, Mr. Roosevelt may have to ask still more money before June, and Federal relief spending in the next fiscal year seems certain to be far greater than the President hoped when he was making budget plans a few weeks ago. Which leads into the subject of —
HOW TO PAY FOR IT
NE way, of course, is to borrow—to add this quarter billion to the 38 billions of public debt we already are passing on to taxpayers of future years. Also the extra hundreds of millions that apparently will further swell the relief budget for next year. Also the extra $200,000,000 a year for the next four years which the President has sug-
gested be piled on top of previously anticipated naval expenditures.
But somehow we are no longer so hopeful that Government pump-priming is the road to prosperity. We have been on the borrow-and-spend highway for years, but still the horizon recedes. We have begun to suspect that we might make more progress by working back onto that long, hard trail where tax tolls force us to pay all we can as we go.
Of course the Government's budget can’t be balanced under present conditions. Business volume and payrolls have shrunk, and so have revenues. But we can do two things to limit deficits. :
One is to curb spending to the minimum which necessity demands. The other is to seek revenue from new sources. (Hiking old tax rates that have passed the point of diminishing returns won't increase revenues.) There is one new revenue source which if tapped, in our opinion, will act automatically to curb spending. That is taxation of the incomes of persons in the middle brackets, who now pay little, and in the lower brackets, who now pay nothing.
NLY about 2,000,000 voters—about 5 per cent of the population-—pay income taxes under the present Federal schedules. The other 95 per cent by no means escape Federal taxation. In fact, that 95 per cent is grossly overtaxed by the multitude of hidden levies.
We hope that those pocket-picking taxes will be wiped out entirely some day, and that the Government will obtain all its revenues from taxes that are direct, visible and proportioned to ability to pay. And a good time to start is now, when additional revenue is badly needed.
By broadening the base, the number of income taxpayers can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled. We should like to see them quintupled, for we should like to see five times as many Americans interested in how the Government spends their money.
We have heard political cowards say that middle-class citizens now exempt from income taxation would resent being forced to pay anything and that others now paying only a small income tax would resent any increase. We don’t believe it. We don’t believe that citizens with incomes large enough to get along on would resent paying their share out of pocket to operate the Government and help take care of unfortunates whose incomes have disappeared. Least of all do we believe that these citizens would prefer to pass that burden to their children.
PRESERVE THE BENTON MURALS!
“T™ told three out of five visitors to the State Library ask about them,” says our columnist Anton Scherrer, in citing the public's interest in the $20,000 collection of historical Hoosier murals painted by Thomas Hart Benton. These murals, however, are packed away in the Manufacturers Building at the State Fair Grounds. State art patrons and Indiana Historical Society members repeatedly have urged that the panels be rescued from threatened decay and placed where art lovers may see them. Only this week Col. Richard Li¢ber, who served as director of the commission which had charge of the murals’ preparation, made several suggestions for their preservation. Such a work of art is deserving of every effort to find it a better home than an 18-foot box tucked away at the Fair Grounds.
“Too Many C
THEY
Farewell _By Herblock
i J # ; &
Ny,
[A AE
N RR \ N
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
Chicago Assessor Has What Seems To Your Scrivener an Idealistic But Not Such a Realistic Idea.
(CHICAGO, Feb. 11.—But for Chicago's fine civic honor a rather serious situation might prevail just now. John S. Clark, the county assessor, has undertaken to levy
the personal property tax on the basis of
the more or less true confession of the citizens as written in their Federal income tax returns. He is permitted to consult these intimate documents by authority of an amendment to the Federal
law which now makes them available to the officers of local taxing bodies. Formerly they were accessible only to tax commissions of states having the state income tax. Illinois has no state income tax, and the personal property tax, if collected in full, would suffice in its place. On the basis of the Federal returns Mr. Clark is proceeding in Se 28 a sort of way to tax as personal SE property a vast amount of posses- > i : sions of all kinds, including the | ARTE plant and equipment of great corporations and their treasure. That Mr. Pegler is to say, he is going through the preliminary motions of proceeding. He will not proceed far, because the temperament of Chicago and public sentiment are such that any serious attempt to collect taxes would be regarded as grave misconduct in office, and he probably would be impeached.
» ” n ET Chicago people regard a taxpayer as something on the order of a traitor and anyone who attempts to collect taxes, other than Federal, as a subversive influence. On Mr. Clark’s list one firm which appeared to have no property at all in 1936 is accused of having possessed $414,000 worth in 1937. Another, which reported $857 worth of this world’s goods in 1936, is now listed at $2,746,000. Mr. Clark also has accused most of the civie leaders and rich men of the county of dodging their
personal taxes—which is true, of course, because that is one of the most honored customs of the country, He showed a little snobbery there, incidentally, because the poor and middlers also have dodged their taxes just as faithfully as the rich.
» ” s FTER all, a poor man or a middle class man deserves the same credit for good citizenship as a rich man in this democraey, and their groups can look Mr. Clark square in the eye and defy him to show where they ever paid any more in proportion to their means than the most distinguished aristocrat in town. In the matter of dodging the personal property tax all Chicago has kept the faith for many years, and there are many proud citizens who can take their oath that they never paid a dollar in their lives. These are zealots, however. The average run has been content to pay a nominal amount, based on a nominal appraisal of their own reckoning. Fortunately, even if Mr. Clark were serious, it would be impossible for him to achieve his purpose,
because it has been so long since anybody did pay the full rate on a full appraisal that there is nobody leat in Chicago who can remember how to reckon a ull tax.
The Hoosier Forum
I wholly disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.—Voltaire.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING TERMED ESSENTIAL By E. 8. Barber Our friend Pat Hogan displays to the “nth” degree an attitude all too common, a sublime self-satisfaction that if he is doing well it is evidently the sublime will that he should prosper; and that others must be content with whatever falls their lot. Surely he can see that with a shortage in the United Sfhtes alone of 10 million jobs, “something under the sun” has prevented at least a part of the people from getting their “just rewards.” Anyone who will read the history of unions, will realize that the munificence of many pay checks has been made possible by the unions, by the men who have made sacrifices, who have had enough enlightened selfishness to see that “in union there is strength.” Look around and see which occupations are the better paid—the organized or unorganized ones? The employers are organized and the Supreme Court upholds the right of labor to do the same; as Charles Taft says: “The unions are here to stay.” The Wagner Law is an effort to balance conditions. When 60 families control the wealth of the country, can the rest of us hope to get our just rewards without collective bargaining?
= » ” PREFERS NONUNION SHOP, READER SAYS By J. C. M. Pat Hogan of Columbus, Ind. tells Frank Moore of Newcastle good workers do not need unions. Pat Hogan is right and I believe the best thing a working man can do is break away from any and all unions. In 1926 I was in a strike; the results were a lockout. I called on one of the men and asked him to come back to work. He said no, I think too much of my honor to “scab” on the job. He did not get his job back and he has not worked since. He passes handbills once in a while and his wife takes in washings to feed and clothe him and the children, but the union did not give him one cent to help ends meet. In 1937 there were 100,000 on strike; in 1938 100,000 are crying for relief. Where is there honor in such doings? I believe every wife should forbid her husband to strike and best of all forbid unions to operate, Mr. Hogan, I am for you, and as for the man 50 years old being let out, I would like to know what the union does for a man when he reaches the age of 50. I myself prefer to work in the nonunion shop for 60 cents per hour
in preference to the union shop for more.
(Times readers are invited to express their views in these columns, religious controversies excluded. Make your letter short, so all can have a chance. Letters must be signed, but names will be withheld on request.)
READER-AUTHOR SEES OPPORTUNITY IN MOSCOW By Daniel Francis Clancy, Logansport “Moscow—So acute is the shortage of books in Moscow that parents and children go to the author’s house and ask permission to copy in manuscript some of his work....” Boy, I wish I lived in Russia— there's just a chance that someone might drop in. “Big-toe Guards” are advertised for sale in the London Times, Dr. George D. Strayer says “There are sometimes people on boards of edu-
cation who are not enlightened.” That is what is usually called a magnificent understatement. The Hon. Frederick Landis once said that “the only reason that this country is not in the bone pile is because this great land of ours is so rich that even the politicians couldn’t drain it.”
8 8 » SEES NEW DEAL MOVING TOWARD DICTATORSHIP By Edward F. Maddox The specter of New Deal dictatorship cannot be downed. Glenn Frank sees it now. Even some of the blindest of followers now begin to realize something queer about New Deal strategy. :
Some think the alien monster is socialism, some communism, while others call it fascism. Whatever type it copies, it is certain that it is alien, revolutionary and un-Amer-fcan. One of the best indications that the New Deal is moving in the direction of dictatorship is its lust
LONELY
By MAUD COURTNEY WADDELL
The old lombardy tree stands slim and high, A lonely sentinel beside the gate. Its quivering leaves send sad constant sigh O'er the fresh cut stump of its stricken mate. Above the moon sails wistfully by And gazes down to earth with lonely eye.
DAILY THOUGHT
And they continued three years without war between Syria and Israel.—I. Kings 22:1.
PEACE is rarely denied to the peaceful.—Schiller,
for power concentrated in the Chief Executive. The next is the political character of the boards and commissions appointed to use that power. Then comes the nature, source and aims of New Deal laws. We are now suffering from the effect of legislation designed to punish and finally destroy our present economic system. No form of dictatorship ean or will continue under our present political or economic system or under the checks and balances of our Constitution.
An added danger is the fact that.
as soon as this Nation is regimented under any alien form of dictatorship, we will be compelled to take the side of that faction in the coming struggle for world power. Our only salvation from falling victims to one of these alien aims is for people to wake up and demand that our elected officials faithfully perform their duties in accordance with the oath of office they have sworn. The central point of attack is in the legislative field, We are being flooded, both in State and Nation, with alien inspired reform laws designed to centralize and change our form of government. The United States ought to benefit from the examples of Russia and Germany.
# 2 2
NEW DEAL TERMED UNRULY CHILD By Mabel German It seems the New Deal, the brainchild of the Roosevelt Administration, has become unruly and {ts “foster-father,” F. D. R., would ‘like to put the blame for its ignorance and blunder on big business. Now what could you expect of a child born in a foreign country, brought to free America and never taught Americanism. Naturally it would follow the teachings of its native
country. The Roosevelt Administration has coddled this foreign child and the taxpayers have supported it until it is an overgrown spoiled child that thinks it must have its own way, right or wrong. It is only 5 years old, but F. D. R. has allowed it to steer the mighty ship of state. And, while this brain-child is large enough, its judgment is poor. It steers first right, then left, and will not stay in the middle of the stream, thus avoiding the danger of grounding the old ship which has been in use 150 years and never was grounded before. This brain-child does very well steering a fishing boat. Big business can’t be to blame for the near grounding of the ship, for it was the F. D. R. brain-child who was steering, with his eyes shut to begin with, and then he was not going in the right direction. He'd better stick to fishing until 1940 when the taxpayers will send him back home. . . .
Gen. Johnson Says—
Rather Than Plan More Highways,
Government Should Try to Make’
Existing Capitalist System Work,
EW YORK, Feb. 11.—The latest white rabbit to peek over the brim of the magic Washington hat is eight billion dollars worth of superhighways. It is the latest to get a place in the sun, but by no means the newest in the hutch. At the beginning of
the great epidemic of panomania in 1933, this was °
one of the sturdiest bunnies under consideration, The details of its present form have not been dis=
closed but then it was a grandiose
scheme to spend ten billions on a new idea for populations called “Roadville.” The Government buys two rights-of-way three miles wide, One runs from ocean to ocean and the other from Canada to Mexico, Upon each is constructed an eightlane highway strips. The project is to pay for itself. partly by tolls and partly by real estate speculation. Town sites are laid out on the 1ightse of-way and both city and farm property are to be sold to the multitudes who will be attracted by this swift new channel of communication and transit. At least four varying versions of this magnificent
Hugh Johnson
pipedream floated around Washington in those fever-,
ish days, but this most ambitious and elaborate of them saw the road as one continuous community— like the Roman wall in old England—a readjuste ment of population to a new and better (maybe)
pattern. 8 ” ”
T was to be self-liquidating and self-sustaining and
the sudden and tremendous outpouring of cone struction money was to restore prosperity in a trice. The present appearance of this white rabbit seems to be much less ambitous—just some superhighway toll-roads to cost eight billion bucks and, according to press agents reports, to be financed locally by the sale of bonds which people will rush to buy because the tolls will amply provide for interest and for pay= ing off the collosal debt in equal installments over 20 or 30 years.
What's the matter with that? Oh, nothing except , that nobody knows whether the tolls will pay the
charges and the securities could be nothing more than experiments of a highly speculative sort; that eight billions of investment money concentrated here would take too great a proportion of investment money away from other more normal and necessary work and that the harmful effect of existing roads, including rail roads, on such a new transportation system is not known any better than the effect of such a new sys tem on existing roads. » » » HE main matter with it is that it is just another of our frequent and expensive excursions into the unknown in an effort to find some way out of this depression other than the more obvious, if more dif ficuly, way of trying to make our existing capitalist and profits system work. Any improvement in transport and communication
is a social benefit, but there has to be some balance in social benefits. We could always use better roads, but in this department we are away ahead of the lag in other lines. What we need most of all just now, is to get money to work producing things that people need to live—houses, clothes, food and necessaries— rather than to produce more of what they need to move.
Business—By John T. Flynn
After Visiting Missouri and Ohio Columnist Believes Criticism Should Be Directed at Sales Tax Rather Than Capital Gains Levy.
T. LOUIS, Feb. 11.—Traveling around in Ohio and Missouri, it is hard to forget that there is a thing called taxes. And it is also difficult to stop thinking that the people are kept in a state of worry about the wrong tax diseases, As in most places, Ohlo and Missouri have sales taxes. But the pleasant features of these sales taxes are the manner in which they are levied and collected. Here in Missouri, for instance, they have gone on the pasteboard and zinc standard. The sales tax is 2 per cent. Two per cent of a dime is two mills and there are no coins small enough to pay that. So Missouri issues little coins—and not so little at that, about the size of a silver dollar—made of pasteboard. Each one represents a mill and if you should ever get a dime’s worth of those coins in your pocket you would have 20 of them. So now the State is demonetizing them and issuing zinc mill coins. ss & =» N Ohio there are no coins, but every time you make a purchase subject to taxation you get a receipt like a large stamp. : Now see how the two systems work. In Missouri with these small tokens, as they call them, it is possi ble to compute a 2 per cent tax on any purchase, however small. If you buy a nickel’s worth, you pay one mill tax. But in Ohio there is no way of computing 2 per cent in terms of any existing coin on anything less than 50 cents. 'So when you make pure chases of less than 50 cents they do the best they can. I bought, in Ohio, something for a dime and I was charged a tax of 1 cent. That is a 10 per cent tax:
According to Heywood Broun
Florida's Sun Is Good for the Skin, but Dulls Even the Slowest Wit;
Columnist Twice Calls George Ade "Mr. Tarkington" in a Conversation, *
large and populous state every day. A 10 per cent sales tax is an outrage. I could not help making a little calculation. Of course I pay an income tax too —State and Federal. It runs about 10 per cent. I have to pay taxes on my money when I get it and I have to pay taxes when I spend it. On that dime when it came to me I had to pay 10 per cent and I had to pay another 10 per cent as it departed. That’s 20 per cent on that dime. And that’s not the whole tax story. ® = =
BY in Ohio food is exempt from these sales taxes. In Missouri, however, nothing is exempt. The tax falls on everything—even a loaf of bread. In Missouri this sales tax is used to pay the old-age assistance payments so shamefully mixed up in politics. In Ohio the old-age assistance payments are paid out of the tax on liquor. Ohio taxes the bottle— Missouri taxes the market basket. The tax starts at the cradle—on milk. It costs about a dollar a year to pay the taxes on the milk consumed by a baby alone.
You have to pay the Government literally a license tax of a dollar a year to operate a baby. Now the point of all this is that these taxes fall on the people who can least afford to pay. It is a direct and devastating tax on purchasing power, but its evil effect is lost sight of because it is paid out in such small bits the taxpayer is hardly aware of how much he is being penalized. There is, however, no squawking about this. All the yelling is about the capital-gains tax-—the taxes levied against the man who makes a profit out of the rise in the price of his stocks or bonds or real estate.
Consider the number of 10-cent purchases made in a | We are worrying about the wrong thing,
IAMI, Feb. 11.—I am conducting a brief scientific experiment here as to the effects of the sun upon human personality. My final paper is not yet complete, but even now I am prepared to announce to an eager world that the sun is good for the skin and bad for the mind. Offe migh. have guessed as much. Great civilizations have heen created in burning climes, but at the moment one cannot speak of national progress without including the Scandinavians. In addition I am told by travelers that Denmark is the nearest approach to Utopia which the modern world affords. And Russia, which has, for the most part, bleak winters, is engaged upon the most ambitious adventure of our day. And so it seems that the rule goes “The more sun the less speed.” For instance, wintry Wisconsin is more advanced than sun-drenched Florida. Even in my own limited experience ultra-violet rays seem physically stimulating but mentally sedative.
NLY this morning I met an economic royalist in the lobby. He said, “How are you, Heywood?” And I said that I was doing as well as could be expected. If we had been in New York during the blizzard he would have given me a filthy look, and I would have returned it with usurious interest, Tolerance is an insidious vice, and I will do well to move along before I become a little friend of all the world with neither a mean look fior word for anybody. It is not good that lions and lambs should lie down together this side of Paradise ony :
him with rapturous and reverent adoration, but the only trouble is that twice I called him “Mr. Tarkinge ton.” He let it go. Possibly he has been a Florida addict long enough to know that along about noon down here all Indiana authors look alike. No generalization should be set down without note
being made of conspicuous exceptions. There are "
those whom the sun peps up into a fighting fury. I saw the Washington Redskins, pro champions, play against the Chicago Bears on one of the warmest days on which football has ever been attempted. It wasn’t much as football, but no boxing tournament ever afforded more spirited slugging. o o » N a sense it was a tribute to the integrity of the game, for the lads in the line weren't kidding. Rival backs and tackles ‘took a poke at each other after each play, and even the head linesman had to duck a right-hand swing, The ferocity of the young men was all the more extraordinary, since all the players are drawn from college ranks and are, I assume, scholars of distinction. It is true that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth were without representation and I do not know whether even a Florida sun could rouse any member of the Ivy League into a state where he would violate sportsmanship to the extent of sticking a left hand jab into a fellow competitor's eye. Of course, I haven't been chasing down the field under punts and trying to grab anybody by the neck, Such exercise might bring about a bitter and better state of mind. All I can report is that from an arm chair on the lawn this seems a lovely world, ine habited by the most prepossessing people. I've get to
| Shap out of it. The world isn't really as good as all
in two one-way .
a
RRR Ae