Good of the country;

              ATLANTA
BALTIMORE
BIRMINGHAM HASKINS & SELLS PHILADELPHIA
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BOSTON CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS BUFFALO SPAROINVTID LEONUCEIS
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DENVER TULSA
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NEW ORLEANS EXECUTIVE OFFICES PARIS
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37 WEST 39TH ST., NEW YORK SHANGHAI
VOL. VII NEW YORK, FEBRUARY, 1924 No. 2
The Good of the Country
EVERYBODY concedes that taxes are
too high. It is probably not too
sweeping a statement to say that everyone
would like to see taxes reduced. But
taxes furnish the means whereby the ex­penses
of government are met, and no one
expects any federal government, or sub­division
thereof, to get along without funds.
The time-worn question of how much
any government properly requires for
necessary expenses may never be answered.
But this country of ours has put itself in
the sound position of budgeting its finan­cial
affairs, and the machinery has been
provided for estimating in advance, with a
fair degree of precision, the expense of con­ducting
government. Based on past ex­perience
and probable future needs, the
very competent and painstaking Secretary
of the Treasury has told us that present
rates of taxation may be substantially re­duced.
If there is anyone in the country
who should know, it is the Secretary of the
Treasury. But certain politicians appear
to question his judgment. The issue of
tax reduction is related apparently for
political purposes to the soldiers' bonus.
Certain other individuals have, however,
raised questions which have an economic
rather than a political aspect. The Secre­tary
of the Treasury has stated that a
reduction of surtaxes would tend to attract
back into industry funds which have been
diverted therefrom by tax-exempt securi­ties.
This has been challenged. The
counter-claim has been made that munici­pal,
county, and state projects are as much
industry as the business operations carried
on by private enterprises.
The latter argument may probably not
be controverted, but the principle of "easy
come, easy go" tends to extravagance, or
at least to the utilization of funds beyond
the point of necessity and economic desira­bility,
and, apparently, without the realiza­tion
that interest on funds borrowed for
local improvements and sinking-fund pay­ments
must be met by local taxation. The
burden of taxation would therefore be
shifted in many instances from the people
as a whole to those who happen to live in
localities where extravagant public im­provements
are under way or contemplated.
If an amendment to the Constitution
were to prohibit the issue of tax-exempt
securities, all securities, both industrial
and municipal, would then, so far as sur­taxes
are concerned, be on the same basis,