Cheap Performance

The 623,000 people who live in the District of Columbia have a local government which costs 48-odd million dollars a year. Because its large realty holdings are taxexempt, the Federal Government last year contributed a flat $5,000,000 to help run the District. For the privilege of doing business in Washington, some 45,000 businessmen paid in licenses and business-privilege taxes another two million into the District's till. The additional 41 millions or so were paid by D. C. citizens who always grouse about taxation without representation, because Congress makes their laws but they cannot vote for Congressmen.

This year the House, through an advisory committee which included ten D. C. citizens and officials, overhauled the District's tax structure with the object of making the District selfsupporting. Last week when the new D. C. tax bill appeared before the House, it was found to contain :

1) A maximum limit of $1.75 per $100 on the realty tax (still very low by comparison with other cities).

2) Abolition of a tax on intangible personal property.

3) An income tax, personal and corporate, brand-new for the voteless District of Columbia. The personal tax ran from 2% on $1,000 of taxable income to 7% on upwards of $9,000.

D. C. citizens who sat in on the bill's preliminary drafting thought an income tax would be fair enough, partly because 36 of the 48 States now have such taxes either personal, corporate or both, partly because it appeared, in the light of this year's Supreme Court decisions, that Federal employes would share such a tax--and U. S. workers constitute about one-fifth of the District's population.

Almost incredible to these voteless tax payers was the very first amendment made in the bill last week by the House. Offered by Missouri's Cochran, boldly supported by Majority Leader Sam Rayburn, overwhelmingly--and anonymously--voted by all present, the amendment specifically exempted all members and employes of Congress from "be District income tax.

Oklahoma's Nichols offered an extraordinary excuse for Congressional exemption.

"I am not here of my own volition," said he. "I come by reason of the fact that I am a servant of the constituency of approximately 300,000 people, the same as all of you men. ... I would have to be here if we were living in tents!"

When the District's voteless citizen-advisers beheld the House's handiwork, they sped to the Senate hot with anger. Virginia's Carter Glass promptly announced himself as a champion for scores of thousands of Federal workers not so fortunate as to work for Congress. What the House had done for itself, the Senate could undo. Pending redress, Columnist Raymond Clapper (Scripps-Howard) spoke for other nonimmune D. C. residents in words of measured scorn.

"A cheap . . . performance . . ." he wrote. "A year or two ago the House was denouncing as unpatriotic those capitalists who dodged income taxes by incorporating themselves in the Bahama Islands. . . . The Congressmen who enjoy a variety of special privileges here, including squatters' rights for their automobiles in downtown 'no parking' areas, don't have to incorporate themselves to escape the taxes which other Government'employes would have to pay. . . . They can just fix the law so it can't apply to them."

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