Odoriferous Duty

If a skunk had wandered on to the floor of the House, Congressmen could not have watched it more nervously than they watched the 1941 Tax Bill, just sent in by the Ways & Means Committee. But under the gag rule to bar amendments from the floor (which Republicans planned to fight as usual, expecting as usual to lose) they could only wring their hands, utter a few pained monosyllables, then vote on the bill. They were expected to do their duty by passing it this week.

The new bill calls for an increase of $3,529,200,000 in taxes for defense--including $1,322,900,000 in new corporate taxes, $1,152,000,000 in additional income taxes, $151,900,000 more in gift and estate taxes, the balance in new excise taxes. At the last minute the committee lopped off $26,100,000 worth of taxes on candy, chewing gum, metal signs and cutlery, replaced them with other levies designed to bring in at least $50,000,000. The new additions, and what they are expected to yield:

> On net income over $100,000 from sales of radio time, a tax starting at 5% ($4,800,000).

> On the use of yachts of over 28 feet, from $10 to $200 a year ($200,000).

> On billboards ($7,000,000).

> On gifts and estates, from 1% to 4% more than the $113,900,000 increase already voted ($38,000,000).

> On sporting goods, various excises (yield not estimated).

Scented Chambers. The musky smell that Congressmen thought they detected on the floor of the House was nothing to what came from the committee room itself. The ten Republican members of the committee, led by Massachusetts' Allen Treadway, issued a nose-holding minority report, aimed at the New Deal's failure to make any real dent in the non-defense spending that made the tremendous new tax bill for defense necessary.

Treadway's nine dissenters (smugly ignoring the fact that most Republicans vote solidly with Democrats on money-grabbing-bills) went to town protesting against "the prodigality of the New Deal spenders" who got the Government into this fix., "These wastrels," said the report, "have engaged in the greatest peacetime orgy of" extravagance in history. . . . The defense: program did not precipitate the present crisis in Government financing, but merely-made it more acute. . . .

"We . . . have cooperated with the:

Democratic majority . . . to . . . produce the best possible measure under all the circumstances. . . . Those who, like ourselves, feel that there is much room for its improvement should always bear in mind that there is no such thing as a good tax bill. . . . The most that can be said in its favor is that it might have been worse."

The Senate will get the bill when the House is through with it. Apparently the only provision which the Senate plans to fight is the bill's proposal to make joint returns mandatory for husbands & wives who live together (TIME, July 21). But a band of 15 Senators, mostly Westerners from States which have a community-property law (permitting family income to be divided equally between husband & wife for income-tax purposes), chose grey-maned Pat McCarran of Nevada to lead the fight.

Said glum Pat McCarran: "That idea is all wrong from the fundamental moral and Constitutional angles. . . . We're going after it. ... I guess they need the money, all right, but they'll have to find it somewhere else."

Just or Unjust? The Administration had plenty of arguments to justify the joint-return rule--whereby the Treasury hopes to raise $323,000,000 in extra revenue. The Joint Committee (of both Houses) on Internal Revenue Taxation listed some of the arguments in a 16-page pamphlet.

> Under the present law, if the family's income is all earned by the husband, the family pays more tax than it would pay on the same income if the wife contributed to it, filed a separate return. "Since in most cases, the family income is contributed by the husband, the present law operates unjustly against the great majority of families in the country."

> Community-property laws now give families in certain States an unjust advantage over families in other States--an advantage that the new law will do away with.

> Instead of invading the rights of a married woman, the present bill "treats her exactly in the same manner as her husband. ... It merely regards the marital community as the taxable unit instead of the individuals who make it up."

> The notion that joint returns would encourage sin and divorce is nonsense.

Just or not, the proposal is due for a hot battle in the Senate that may hold the tax bill up for a month or more.

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