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Your 1935 tax burden, in stacked $5 gold pieces, equals a pile of 17,000 Empire State Buildings.
$17,000,000,000 - seventeen billion dollars! That's our 1935 tax burden, imposed upon us by our federal, state, county, city, school, road, and other taxing bodies... Little taxpayer, what now?
TAXES Everybody Pays!
by B. C. FORBES
Mask by Doane Powell
photo by Bert Thayer
POLITICIANS TODAY are spending forty percent of American citizens' income.
If all the gold in the United States-the most mountainous supply ever possessed by any nation-were tendered in payment of these annual expenditures, the bill wouldn't be half paid.
Our total political (public) expenditures now equal in one year almost all the gold in the world!
If the full amount of taxpayers' money now being spent were collected, the amount demanded from us would be $17,000,000,000.
During the eight hours of every business day of the year, we would have to hand over $118,055 every minute.
It would take a taxgatherer almost eighteen years merely to count one year's receipts if everybody tendered five-dollar gold pieces.
Stacked, the five-dollar gold pieces would reach over four thousand miles into the sky- a height equal to seventeen thousand Empire State Buildings piled one on top of the other. Gold equaling the expenditures of tax leviers for one year would weigh almost seventeen thousand tons, or nearly twice the weight of the United States Regular Army.
If a pay-as-we-go policy were followed by tax spenders, you and I and everybody else in America would have to work for them (on the average) two full days every five-day workweek. In other words, we would toil all Monday and Tuesday to earn enough to pay the amount spent by political officeholders, leaving us only Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to win the daily bread of ourselves and our dependents.
But tax leviers, realizing that they are spending far more than we taxpayers can possibly contribute these lean days, are compelling us to pay now only $10,000,000,000 of the stupendous total of $17,000,000,000. They figure on running behind-on going into debt-no less than $7,000,000,000 in twelve months.
Our government debt has already soared beyond even the peak reached because of the World War. The $10,000,000,000 paid off by Coolidge and Mellon has all been respent-and more.
Washington has piled up a debt equivalent to far more than a thousand dollars for every family in the land-and is still sending the total skyrocketing. The total today is in excess of $28,000,000,000---far beyond the total amount of gold in all the world. "As strong as the Bank of England" used to be a common saying. The United states government debt is eighteen times the stock of gold in the Bank of England.
NotWithstanding that our political leaders are not collecting nearly as much as they are spending, tax levies already bear cruelly heavily on many industries, on many enterprises, on many families and individuals- as you doubtless will discover during 1935.
Ponder these examples:
The oil industry is paying in taxes (over a thousand million dollars) no less than five times its earnings. .
Leading utility companies pay more to Uncle Sam and other tax-gatherers than they pay in dividends to the millions of investors who furnished the capital.
America's railroads paid $254,969,492 in taxes in 1933 and $95,933,622 in dividends- that is, Uncle Sam and other tax-eaters took almost three dollars for each lone dollar paid those thrifty citizens who saved money and made it possible for America to have that essential of essentials, railway transportation.
Motor vehicle taxes, all told, exceed a billion dollars--one thousand million dollars-a year. Do those who have put up the money to establish automobile companies collect any such amount? They do not!
Says President ·George A. Sloan of the Cotton Textile Institute: "According to the U. S. Census for 1931, the cotton-textile pay roll amounted to $220,000,000. On that basis the industry's present tax bill would be equivalent to seventy-three percent to the total amount paid in wages in that year."
Some business concerns-Kroger Grocery is one-pay more than forty separate,and distinct classes of taxes. Kroger Grocery’s taxes amount to thirty-four percent on its invested capital.
The U. S Steel Corporation pays nothing to its common-stock owners, but pays $3.74 per share in taxes.
One utility-that is struggling to survive has had its taxes increased $9,000 a day since 1928.
Maybe you don't worry about how much corporations are penalized by tax collectors.
But this may strike home to you: Every time you buy two packages of cigarets for a quarter, you pay twelve cents tax. If you have a phone, you pay $6.42 a year in taxes. If it were not for taxes, your electric and gas bills would be very much lighter-utility companies pay in taxes thirty dollars for every family in the country.
Your rent bill could be reduced one-quarter or one-third were no taxes imposed. Believe it or not, in this "land of the free" taxes now cost more than food!
In1933, fully one thousand new laws imposing taxes and increasing tax collections were passed.
Then, to add to the taxpayer's woes, he received from the Treasury Department a few weeks ago an Income Tax Pink Slip to be filled in for the "benefit" or the public revealing "Total Gross Income, Total Deductions, Net Income, Total Credits Against that Income for Purposes of Normal Tax, Tax Payable." How avidly the information which is thus exacted from the well-to-do and wealthy will be utilized by questionable schemers for questionable--or even criminal-purposes!
Uncle Sam alone has 680,181 job-holders feeding out of the tax trough that you and I are compelled to keep filled.
And, all told, there are -go ahead and wince no fewer than -183,000 political units in this land of ours empowered to reach into our pockets and filch money for taxes!
State, county, municipal, school, road, and our myriad other taxing bodies take from us $10,000,000,000 of the grand (or scandalous) total of $17,000,000,000. They are the worst of all.
But don't despair. President Roosevelt is planning to get after them.
Not only so, but the President and his closest associates became convinced several months ago that America could not restore prosperity unless they courted and won the confidence and support of business- the filler of pay envelopes. Also, that the-sky's-the-limit governmental expenditures must be checked.
Given cooperation between Washington and industry, this young, virile, enterprising, inventive, ambitious, wealthy, resourceful nation should again assert its ability to achieve prosperity unmatched by any nation, to march in the vanguard of world powers and to give to its working people a standard of living unapproached by any other country.
Restore characteristic American cheerfulness and enterprise, and even our now appalling tax problems will melt.
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The average price of a new home then was $3450 about 2.16 times the yearly average wage of $1600. Which was about 2.56 times the price of a new car $625. And the future was progressive not regressive
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