Progress

TAXES

Every day last week six tax strategists, Democrats and Republicans, sweated be hind closed doors, trying to write a tax bill acceptable to everybody. At week's end a pay-as-you-go tax bill at last seemed in sight.

Granite-faced old Robert L. ("Muley") Doughton, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, had at last been pushed from his stubborn stand against any tax "forgiveness." Majority Leader John W. McCormack, responding to Ad ministration pressure, and Tennessee's shrewd Jere Cooper, the committee's best tax brain, did the pulling and hauling. Old Muley now came out for cancellation of about half of 1942 taxes; the Demo cratic majority of his committee gave his bill a favorable report.

Republican committee members, who meanwhile had scaled down their demands for full 1942 tax forgiveness to 75%, marked time until the bill comes to a vote on the House floor next week. Minnesota's balding Harold Knutson still held out for something closer to the Ruml plan; he hoped for many a Congressman's conversion while home for the Easter recess. Dopesters agreed that the House would finally pass some kind of tax bill, to throw it, as usual, in the Senate's lap for rewriting.

Soon Congress must face the real problem: how to raise the $16 billions demanded last January by Franklin Roosevelt as a check against inflation. As they pondered this question last week Congress men heard the rumble of sales-tax advocates, whose arguments this year might be almost unanswerable.

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