More Treacle

Tax-weary members of the House Ways and Means Committee sat back and gasped as President Roosevelt sent word to Congress that he would need $4,770,065,588 more for the U.S. Army, $3,323,000,000 more for the Navy and merchant marine--a total of $8,093,065,588 in additional authorizations for national defense.

Nor was that the end. This week the President made ready to ask Congress for a whopping big addition to the funds authorized for Britain and China under the Lend-Lease Act. It was hinted that the sum requested might come to as much as $7,000,000,000. In far-off Argentina the Buenos Aires Standard looked on in awe, headlined a story about the President's appropriations: "Oliver Twist of the West," after Dickens' hungry boy who wanted more treacle.

To uphold the Treasury's hoped-for ratio of 1-to-2 between money borrowed and money collected by taxation, Secretary Henry Morgenthau said there might have to be a new tax bill in the next few months. To the Ways and Means Committee, which had just finished sweating over preliminaries for one new bill which adds $3,503,400,000 to the U.S. tax burden (TIME, June 30 et seq.), wringing another $10,000,000,000 out of the U.S. taxpayer seemed an obvious impossibility.

One thing was clear to everybody: the 1941 tax bill that Congress will shortly consider is probably only a shadow of worse to come. Meanwhile, the committee prepared to push it through anyhow.

Incitement to Sin? The U.S. taxpayer is willing to swallow a camel-size defense tax, but a gnat-size affront will still make him gag. Such a gnat was the rule requiring husbands & wives to file joint returns, in the proposed 1941 tax bill. The House Ways and Means Committee hoped thereby to raise $323,000,000 in extra revenue. But a wave of public resentment against compulsory joint returns has swept down on the House. To many a defender of women's rights, the rule looks like a devilish device to sell married women down the river into slavery.

Actually, joint returns will simply mean that wives and husbands with separate incomes will in many cases move into a higher tax bracket.* But women felt that the rule raised a long-laid bogey: the notion that a wife's property belongs to her husband.

Said Wendell Willkie, as he left the White House: "That's a proposal out of the dark ages. It would set the cause of emancipation of women back 500 years." Wrote scholarly Columnist Arthur Krock in the New York Times: "It puts a premium on divorce, celibacy, a lower birth rate and a mercenary attitude toward the estate of marriage." Wrote 76-year-old Arthur Graham Glasgow, noted gas technologist, in a letter to the New York Times: "Such discrimination is immoral as well as unmoral, for it allots a premium ... to living in sin. ..."

*Joint taxes would fall heavily indeed on individually prosperous couples--of whom, however, there are mighty few among the more than 6,000,000 Americans who pay income taxes.

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