Treasury Report

Not to his chief, the President of the U. S., but to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, where all fiscal legislation must originate, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon last week sent his ninth annual report. The Cabinet's senior reporter,/- he forecast a Treasury surplus of $226,000,000 for the current fiscal year (1930) and $123,000,000 for the year after. A new proposal:

"It is highly desirable to introduce some element of flexibility in our tax system in order to take advantage of a surplus whose permanency is not assured. ... A flexible normal tax rate seems to furnish the key. It can be moved up or down without giving rise to administrative difficulties or in any way complicating income tax returns."

When Undersecretary of the Treasury Mills informally suggested a similar plan last month, whereby Congress would authorize the Treasury to vary the normal tax in relation to each year's surplus, Congressional leaders loudly disapproved. Such a system, they contended, would deprive Congress of its basic taxing power. A similar flexibility in the tariff law the Senate now, after seven years' use, would take away from the President.

Fiscal statistics set forth in the Treasury report:

P: The U. S. took in $4,033,250,225 in 1929, a decrease of $9,097,000 from the year before, and paid out $3,848,463,190, an increase of $204,943,315 over 1928. Larger costs for postal service, naval construction, flood control swelled expenditures.

P: The public debt was reduced by $673,092,815, to a total of $16,931,197,747. P: Though the U. S. Government has no formal connection with the Young Plan for German Reparations, Secretary Mellon advised Congress to authorize the President to make a new agreement with Germany to accord with a reduced scale of payments to the U. S. for Army costs and mixed claims as established by the Young Plan.

P: Secretary Mellon on Prohibition: "The law-enforcement work for the prevention of smuggling of liquor into the U. S. from the sea continued to be satisfactory. Some liquor smuggling is still going on along the seaboard and there remains a considerable amount of such smuggling on the Great Lakes. . . . Prohibition agents made 66,878 arrests . . . seized 7,299 automobiles ... 89 boats. . . . The operations of the Treasury Department in the enforcement of Prohibition are becoming stable and more effective."

/-Alone of the Cabinet, the Secretary of State is required to make no annual report, on the theory that diplomatic dealings are confidential between nations, hence no matter for public comment.

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