Excess Tax Research Articles

Excess Profits Taxation: Symposium

Excess Profits Taxation: Symposium

Excess Profits Taxation.

Excess Profits Taxation.

Bourgeois Confusion and Proletarian Myopia

ON A NUMBER of occasions I have received propaganda circulars of an organization calling itself Tool Owners Union. Its purpose is said to be promotion of action to safeguard foundation of national well-being and strength-the human right of every American to be secure in his ownership of property and tools, and to enjoy legitimate, competitive earnings therefrom, free from excessive taxation, inflation and confiscation at hands of anyone. Its Platform for Progress says: We are group whose thrift and self-denial have accumulated savings which make possible our country's tools of production. And it goes on to claim that we are primary benefactors of nation because a modern nation is no greater than its stock of tools. It refers to 5 0 million thrifty whose self-denial made possible tools that are very foundation of our national strength and material welfare. It appeals to the human right of every individual . . . to be safeguarded in his person and his productive property (tools) against excessive taxation, monetary manipulation and confiscation at hands of anyone. And it comments on harmful effects of destroying incentive to save and to risk in productive enterprise. Here indeed might be a beginning of a sharp distinction. There are tools that men make and making of which, in a free enterprise system, does depend on voluntary saving of millions. But there are ilso natural resources, e.g., rich subsoil mineral deposits, and there are Superlatively valuable city sites. Surely these natural resources were not brought into existence by saving of nembers of union or of any of those in whose behalf they, assume to speak. And, no less surely, billions of dollars of site value in New York City are obviously consequence of geological forces that made New York harbor and of way that many millions of persons have settled in and about New York City and in territories tributary to it. Th(y are not properly or fairly attributable to or imputable to tool owners alone. But nothing that I have seen in propaganda of Tool Owners Union indicates slightest interest in distinction between capital

The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation.

The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation.

GOPAL, M. H. The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation (with particular reference to India). Pp. xiv, 392. Mysore, India: Bureau of Economic Research, 1947. Rs. 12

GOPAL, M. H. The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation (with particular reference to India). Pp. xiv, 392. Mysore, India: Bureau of Economic Research, 1947. Rs. 12

The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation.

The Theory of Excess Profits Taxation.

The Incidence of Excess Profits Taxation

The Incidence of Excess Profits Taxation

Excess Profits Taxation

Excess Profits Taxation

On the Theory of Price Control

THE object of this paper is to consider, from a theoretical point of view, the price development in a wartime economy with price control short of a general price ceiling. If there is an absolutely complete and universal price ceiling, changes in prices are automatically ruled out. But in hardly any war economy are price increases so completely absent as to make superfluous a study of the development of prices and the factors affecting this development. In no modern war economy, on the other hand, are prices so free to move as to make an equilibrium analysis, based on a continuous and immediate adjustment of supply and demand through changes in prices, a fully adequate approximation of actual developments. A highly instructive model of the behavior of prices in a free-price economy under the stimulus of wartime inflation has been developed by Dr. Koopmans.' Such a model can be considered only as a limiting case which actual developments would approach if there were no control over prices. The present paper starts from the reverse point of view, though it is realized that such treatment assumes great strength in the price control mechanism if it is operating as it is likely to be in a milieu of greatly excessive demand. Price formation will be studied from the supply rather than from the demand side. Wage increases, for instance, will be considered as a price raising factor because they raise costs, not because they swell the public's purchasing power. There seems to be some justification in taking this extreme point of view. Excessive purchasing power does not in itself exercise a price-raising influence. Taxation and compulsory savings may take away a large part of this purchasing power, and the rest may be absorbed by various kinds of voluntary savings. Or, if consumers are left with the money, it may be directed away from the scarce commodities, and thus be prevented from exercising a priceraising influence, by an extensive rationing system. Or finally, if the stream of money is neither absorbed by the government nor canalized into safe regions by rationing, it may simply beat, but not break, the dams erected by the pricecontrolling authorities, in which case excessive demand will result in shop shortages, not in rising prices. In fact, with a high rate of excess profits taxation, entrepreneurs have little stimulus to raise their prices to the point of equilibrium unless costs go up.2

Excess Profits Taxation.

Excess Profits Taxation.

Excess Profits Taxation

Excess Profits Taxation

Excess Profits Taxation in 1941

Excess Profits Taxation in 1941

British Food Journal Volume 33 Issue 12 1931

A resemblance not merely superficial exists between August, 1914, and November, 1931. A rapid orientation in our national outlook marks both dates. Imminence of national disaster was and is the cause in both cases. The analogy may perhaps be pressed a step further if the quickness and the certainty of national response be considered. The introduction by a National Government of universal military service in 1914 has an analogue in the introduction by a National Government of the Abnormal Imports Act of 1931. At this point the analogy would seem to end. The crisis of 1914 demanded the mobilisation of the man power of the country in many fields of activity to prevent the threat to our existence as a nation from being put into execution. In 1931 with a similar threat to our existence the strongest government of all time is content to avail itself of only part of the power that would willingly be placed at its disposal and to discourage the rest. Perhaps we may be permitted to express the hope that so far as duration may be concerned the analogy will also fail. We cannot afford to take four years over this matter. For some time past the nation has been “a beggar on horseback,” and during the last ten years it has made a considerable amount of progress in the direction towards which beggars in that position are popularly supposed to be riding. Progress in this direction has been much aided, if not accelerated, by means of a strong and increasingly developed inferiority complex whereby it appeared to us that anyone could do anything much better than we could do it ourselves, and we were, under its influence, rapidly becoming on the one hand merely agents for foreign manufacturers, the products of whose fields or factories were being distributed on the other hand to people whose purchasing power, owing to excessive taxation and other causes, was rapidly diminishing. In spite of the results of the general election we still seem to be in a large measure deficient in healthy optimism, that belief in our own powers which is usually a condition of success. It has apparently become necessary to assure an English audience that an English hen can lay as good an egg as a Russian or Chinese hen. May we add the further information that English bacon is the best in the world. That plums are grown best at Pershore and strawberries in Kent and Hampshire. That we thoroughly despise the fear that was publicly and gravely expressed by a public man that if we attempted to set our house in order by means of a protective tariff the dreadful foreigner would retaliate and even go to war with us over the matter.

Excessive Tax on Soil Fertility by Crop Production on Poor Land

Excessive Tax on Soil Fertility by Crop Production on Poor Land

The General Property Tax as a Factor in the Unsatisfactory Agricultural Situation

T HE major adjustments in farming which have been necessitated by the changed economic conditions existing since the World War must, no doubt, be made within the farmer's own gates. In these adjustments the farmer has little to expect from legislation that will help him except the continued availability of such technical and economic information as will enable him to make the necessary changes most wisely. Of the things that are outside the farmer's own gates, those with which he can not hope to cope successfully as an individual, and for which government aid must be invoked if relief is to come, the most outstanding problem is that caused by the excessive tax burden on farm property in general and, especially, on farm real estate. No problem which confronts the farmer has so much ethical and economic justification for relief by legislation as has the tax problem. Adjustments in bases for taxation to keep pace with changes in the types and sources of incomes of the people, like most economic adjustments, are at least one or two generations behind the changes to which these adjustments tend to conform. The general property tax, at one time the sole source of income to the ruling class, still constitutes too large a share of the source of all taxes.

Patents. Infringement. Recovery of Profits. Excess Profit Taxes

Patents. Infringement. Recovery of Profits. Excess Profit Taxes

Capital Needs for Education in the United States

EACH of the writers invited to contribute to the Academy's volume on Thrift has probably found the difficulties of his task multiplied by the fact that money values, in which we must perforce define our conceptions of expenditures, savings and capital, are themselves now in process of extraordinary flux. This difficulty is especially evident in discussing investments in education where capital needs aye increasing almost proportionately with commodity and wage prices while the growth of assessment values, on the basis of which these needs must largely be met, has decidedly lagged. The writer of this paper will therefore ask that his readers always interpret his statements on the assumption that money values as of June 30, 1914, have remained stable. When we shall have gotten over the confusion produced by the war and the darkening of counsels engendered by those bent on exploiting their particular theories of safety and progress we shall doubtless find ourselves able to make increases in teachers' salaries, in valuation of property for assessment, and the like, in such a way as to distinguish intelligently between those adjustments which must be made because of depreciation in nominal money values and those that should represent permanent changes in terms of real values. The raising of revenues for public purposes has always taxed the ingenuity of governing authorities. The tornadoes of revolution have more often been generated under the atmospheric pressure of excessive or unwise taxation than from any other cause. When it is recalled that from one-third to three-fifths of all revenues raised by state and local taxation in America go s to the support of public education the problems of taxation and of wise expenditure confronted by our governing authorities on behalf of public chools are evidently far from simple. The conduct of the schools of the people now constitutes by far our largest public enterprise. It is obviously an enterprise in which, unlike roads, or fire protection, or even policing, returns must be taken considerably on faith. Public schools cannot be made selfsupporting as can the post-office and water supply systems. Only strong faith in the permanent values of education can sustain a people in taxing itself, and especially its richest and most powerful members, heavily and persistently for the support of schools which are constantly growing more costly. In estimating the capital needs of education during the next few years several factors require separate consideration: (a) What will be probable increases along lines of educational effort-salaries of teachers, buildings, equipment, longer school year, smaller classes, etc., in elementary and secondary schools and in state colleges and other than special schools-already securely established and progressively developed during the last fifty years? (b) What will be probable expenditures for new types of public education -vocational, physical, continuation -now apparently developing? (c)