Brothers

Philadelphia's municipal finances are in a bad way. All Philadelphia knows it; few Philadelphians seem to care. The city's gas plant is in hock to RFC. Its public libraries can afford to replace only 20,000 of 85,000 dog-eared books which are thumbed to tatters each year. More than a third of Philadelphia's annual revenues go to service old debts. Expensive subways, promoted during the heedless '203, are sealed and empty catacombs; Philadelphia lacked the money to run them or to pay for them.

In council assembled last week, the Fathers of the busted City of Brotherly Love adopted a desperate measure. They levied a flat 1 1/2% income tax on all wages or salaries earned in the city.-Beginning next Jan. 1, everybody's paycheck may be clipped--whether they are bankers, WPA-sters, or suburbanites who live elsewhere but work in Philadelphia. Only ones sure of exemption are corporations, which already pay a State levy and cannot be doubly taxed. A few unions squawked that employers would have to up wages 1 1/2%. But the mass of citizens sleepily accepted the fact that somewhere, somehow, their town had to find $18,000,000 additional revenue or fall to pieces.

*Pennsylvania's Constitution prohibits graduated taxes or exemptions of low incomes.

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