Rising Rumble over Taxes

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

From Begin to Billy, the American audience for a year has cheered or booed the spotlighted drama of the moment. But there is evidence that beneath it all, the political concern seems to be coming back to basics--taxes.

Michigan's Republican Congressman Guy Vander Jagt elevates the tax issue to geophysical dimensions. "It is a tidal wave," he says, after a week of listening to complaints on a trip from Florida to California. Oklahoma's Democratic Representative James R. Jones finds signals of desperation among small businessmen and wage earners. The burdens of state and local taxes are at the breaking point, they say. Then from Washington comes the message of immense increases in the Social Security bite and the series of proposed energy taxes that would reach right back into the pocketbooks of middle-class Americans and business people. There are still echoes of Jimmy Carter's campaign promises to push for major tax reform, and that could wipe out many of the small harbors of tax relief.

For once, it appears that the White House is getting the word. Comprehensive tax reform is off for a year, and a large tax cut is probably coming in early 1978. But American discontent has not yet peaked.

"A lot of people are just finding out the new price tags," says Jones. "Social Security taxes already are a major cause of small-business bankruptcy." Congressional mail was supportive when the tax debates were about raising the Social Security benefits. Then the people got to the bottom line and discovered who had to pay and how much. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims that the anger of businessmen over taxes this autumn is the highest in years. Pollster Louis Harris has placed the national ire at a level he defines as "public outrage." Tax experts believe that there could be a spread of local tax revolts, which temporarily closed schools in Ohio and Oregon. They also fear a rise in "bartering." An accountant may do the books of a dentist, who then tends the bookkeeper's teeth. No money changes hands. No tax is paid.

Art Buchwald tells his fans not to believe it when Carter says that employers will pay more new Social Security taxes than employees. "Who is he kidding?" kids Buchwald. "You are going to pay both taxes."

One of the many conferences on taxes even lured out the old expert, Wilbur Mills, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who will soon begin practicing law in Washington, having surmounted his problems with the bottle and Stripper Fanne Foxe. Mills, who for decades was the key man in devising tax measures, said he was happy to be out of the tax picture because he did not believe the proposals so far discussed were very sound or likely to be passed. He also complained that there was too much White House talk about possible tax changes. Recalled Mills: "F.D.R. used to say, 'Never give a speech on taxes even if you are cutting them.' You bring up taxes and people just get mad."

The Tax Foundation, a conservative watchdog of tax changes, is noodling a revision of Ben Franklin's heretofore immutable law that "nothing is certain but death and taxes." Part of today's problem is that the specific forms taxes will take are no longer all that certain. They go up, surely, but each year the tax law changes are so numerous and complex that the taxpayers are in constant confusion. There has been a major tax revision or debate by Congress every year since 1970.

No wonder that last weekend James Boren, founder and president of the International Association of Professional Bureaucrats (motto: "When in doubt, mumble"), was working the hustings for all he was worth. "We bureaucrats are practical people," Boren, once a special assistant to the U.S. coordinator for the Alliance for Progress, told a Florida audience. "We realize that there is a declining number of taxpayers to support a growing number of us bureaucrats. Therefore, we propose a tax incentive for taxpayers to encourage them to pay more." Boren promises details in his "State of the Bureaucrat Address" next January.

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