To Arms

When Tax Expert Beardsley (pay-as-you-go) Ruml went to Washington two months ago to denounce an excess profits tax, Senators told him an astounding fact. Though most businessmen believed that such a tax was unfair, unsound and wasteful, few besides Ruml had taken the trouble to fight it. Reason: they saw no hope of beating a tax as politically popular as it is economically unsound (TIME, Oct. 2).

Beardsley Ruml thought differently. Back in Manhattan, he set about rounding up businessmen and raising money ($125,-ooo to date) for the battle, which begins this week when the House Ways & Means Committee reopens its hearings on the proposed tax. Last week Ruml announced that more than 100 top businessmen had joined in forming the Business Committee on Emergency Corporate Taxation, enlisted the help of such onetime New Dealers as ex-Housing Expediter Wilson Wyatt and ex-OPAdministrator Leon Henderson to marshal their case at the hearings.

RumFs group, which is not opposing higher taxes for business or anybody else, wants a simple emergency income tax on corporations substituted for the complex formulas and "base periods" of an excess profits tax. Says Ruml: "No excess profits tax ever has been devised that will not do more harm than good . . . It is inequitable and inflationary."

Other businessmen, cheered by the election results, were also taking up arms. Television Manufacturer Allen B. Du-Mont gathered representatives of 62 "growth" companies whose profits have doubled between 1946 and 1949, hence would be hardest hit by any tax which regards recent profits as "excessive." Du-Mont's group organized the National Conference of Growth Companies, plugged for a flat levy on earnings instead of an excess profits tax. Barring this, they wanted a tax base which would not penalize their sudden growth.

The National Association of Manufacturers also chimed in with a plan for a broad and uniform excise tax and a flat corporation defense tax." And the Committee for Economic Development came out for a flat "defense profits tax" on top of a reduced corporate income tax plus increased excise taxes. Said C.E.D.: "The fact that excess profits taxation was an incentive to extravagant expenditure for travel and advertising was a national joke and a national scandal during the last war."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.