A Double-Sawbuck in Every Pocket

The Democrats made their bid for election-year tax popularity last week by pushing a bill through the House to save every person twenty dollars in 1956. Just a few close-calculating plutocrats might object to a twenty-dollars tax cut, and then only on the ground that the nation's largest taxpayers deserve even more relief.

But President Eisenhower, who must worry about national finance as well as the prosperity of business men, has become understandably irate about the Democrats' tax-slashing measure. Multiplied by seventy million taxpayers, the twenty dollar cut puts a $1.4 billion inflationary bulge in the economy, although the nation has already recovered from last year's deflation. Democrats attached the twenty-dollar gift as a rider on an an Administration sponsored bill to delay scheduled excise and corporation tax cuts. If the combined bill passes the Senate, the President will have no alternative but to authorizing inflation, for whether he signs or vetoes the bill, the Treasure tax receipts will be cut.

President Eisenhower concedes, of course, the annually balanced budgets are fiscal fossils; the Administration is trying not so much to balance the ledger as the restrict the government deficit to a few billion dollars. Last year, not this year, was the proper time to reduce taxes.

The Republicans did cut taxes in 1954; they did it in accordance with their filter-down theory of prosperity, slashing the taxes of corporation stockholders, and allowing larger write-offs for industrial depreciation. Without upsetting the economy, Senate Democrats could justifiably attack these top-heavy benefits, and substitute for them tax relief measures that would help poorer taxpayers.

Attempts to revoke last year's tax legislation would undoubtedly face bitter floor fights and strong opposition from a large, stockholding section of the population. The politically profitable illusion that Democratic Congressmen can float twenty dollars of prosperity to every man, woman, and child without causing an inflation, would end. But in abandoning the role of Santa Claus, Democrats would at least deserve the support of the large mass of voters which believes in steeply graduated taxation.