Suchergebnisse

On cover: Official county publications. ; Mimeographed. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Contents: The effect of the debt situation upon Europe's relations with the U.S., by E. M. Patterson; The problems involved in the settlement of international obligations, by N. H. Davis; The effect of the debt settlements on the trade balance of the U.S., by J. W. Angell; The effect on American workers of collecting allied debts, by Matthew Woll; Why the French debt should be cancelled, by J. H. Latane; Friction in international opinion, by C. C. Catt.

The aim of this study is to link up the general trend of Dutch and international political developments with certain events in the domain of social history, some of which are scarcely known and some exciting little attention, being regarded as of mere local interest.A description of the organising methods and the political tactics of the early socialist movement in Western Europe forms an introduction to this enquiry. There are in the main three methods of proceeding in the matter and the one chosen is determined by the particular political conditions of a country at a given moment.Educational societies for the working classes are being founded and the leading executive positions occupied by men belonging to socialist-communist secret societies. These, which are perfectly legal and in every sense public societies, serve as a means for collecting into a body the active-minded workers; at the same time they form a sieve for the selection of such elements as might seem useful and worthy of admittance to membership of the secret society.

The two revenue-collecting services of the United States government offer interesting contrasts in the methods used for the administrative control of their respective field services. This arises in large part from the fact that the Bureau of Customs has been the more decentralized service. Ever since its establishment in 1789, and in the course of a long and continuous existence, it has built up a background of traditional decentralization which contrasts with the policy of centralization characterizing the Bureau of Internal Revenue. The latter service has a much shorter history, really beginning in 1862, although internal taxes were levied by the federal government from 1791 to 1802, and from 1813 to 1817. By virtue of the fact that Congress conferred administrative powers directly upon the commissioner of internal revenue, rather than upon the Secretary of the Treasury (as was done in the case of the customs service), a more integrated and centralized system of control has been used in the internal revenue service since the beginning of its existence.

The Revenue Act of 1943 will be remembered not only as the first one in history to be vetoed by the President, but also as the cause of an outburst in Congress against the executive capable of affecting the fortunes of the Democratic party in the 1944 elections. The significance of this last act in the drama (to date) may be clarified if we review the fiscal situation of the United States at the time, the Administration's tax proposals, and the revenue legislation actually resulting.In January, 1943, the President's budget message estimated expenditures of $100 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1944. Tax revenues for the same period were estimated at $35 billion. The President made three recommendations: (1) raise $16 billion in new tax revenue, or savings, or both, (2) simplify the income tax, and (3) put taxes on a pay-as-you-go basis. In the summer and fall of 1943, Congress enacted legislation to carry out certain parts of the last two proposals. Public discussion had forced on it some consideration of collecting taxes currently.

The prices of commodities and wages of labor recorded in contemporaneous account books are the oldest continuous objective economic data in existence. Economic historians have not neglected this great intellectual resource. In fact, during the last hundred years a large proportion of the outstanding economic and historical talent has been lavished upon price history. Tooke, D'Avenel, and Rogers devoted more than twenty-five years each, at the most productive stage of their careers, to collecting price and wage statistics from manuscript sources and to writing an impressive total twenty-odd learned volumes. In the present century Beveridge in England, Elsas in Germany, Posthumus in the Netherlands, Pribram in Austria, Bujak in Poland, Bezanson and Cole in the United States, and a host of lesser lights on both sides of the Atlantic have uncovered new sources, combed old ones more exhaustively, and employed modern statistical technique to give us relatively complete and refined histories of prices in the leading economic areas of the Western world in modern times. If the old records of commercial transactions are not destroyed in total war, it seems safe to assume that future generations of scholars, seeking light from the past on recurrent inflation and deflation, will produce price histories that surpass all studies yet written in historical range, completeness, and scientific accuracy. In view of these achievements and prospects, social scientists should ask themselves what can be gained from a proper utilization of price history and what losses may result from its misuse.

One of the achievements of the brilliant administration of Harry F. Byrd was the segregation of the sources of revenue. The governor was quite sincere and enthusiastic in his support of this principle, believing, it seemed, that it was the panacea for a great many of our tax troubles. His exuberant enthusiasm caused him to make an error, many believe, when he had written into the rather inflexible constitution of the commonwealth the provision that no state tax shall be levied on real estate and tangible personal property. The state, therefore, no longer has any interest in this kind of property, and its supervision over local fiscal officers extends only so far as they are agents of the state, assessing and collecting the state's revenue.Each county and city has a local commissioner of the revenue, elected by the people, who assesses for the state intangible personal property, individual incomes, and money and capital, and who assesses for the local government tangible personal property, machinery and tools, and merchants' capital. The state tax commissioner has forms printed and sent to each local commissioner on which all the items mentioned above are supposed to be listed at their fair market value by the taxpayer. Mr. Morrissett, the present state tax commissioner, has inaugurated a plan of holding annual conventions of commissioners of the revenue where the problem of assessment and the complications of the state tax code are discussed.

Following the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, the state of Ohio authorized by statute the creation of a state liquor monopoly, purchased $4,500,000 worth of liquor, and perfected plans for the retailing of it through 187 stores owned and managed by the state. In Ohio v. Helvering, the state sought an injunction to restrain the commissioner of internal revenue from collecting from the state the customary federal excise taxes upon the sale of intoxicating liquors. It alleged the immunity of the state and its instrumentalities from federal taxation and further claimed that the federal taxing statutes were not intended by Congress to apply to the states. The court, speaking through Mr. Justice Sutherland, upheld the collection of the tax, reaffirming the doctrine laid down in 1905 in the South Carolina Dispensary Case. The immunity from federal taxation enjoyed by the states extends only to those agencies and functions which are governmental in character and not to those which are proprietary. "When a state enters the market place seeking customers, it divests itself of its quasi-sovereignty pro tanto, and takes on the character of a trader, so far, at least, as the taxing power of the federal government is concerned." The Court rejected as "altogether fanciful" the argument that the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and its later repeal had so altered the status of the liquor traffic that its conduct by the state has become an exercise of the state's police power, and hence a governmental operation immune from federal taxation.

"The financing of government in the South presents an important field of study. The needs in relation to sources of revenue are greater in the South than in other parts of the nation. The South has relied heavily on the property tax to meet these needs, but it has also experimented widely with other forms of taxation. It has depended on federal grants to a great extent, though it has had difficulty in meeting certain conditions set up for some of these grants. The whole subject of government finance needs to be further studied and the experiences of the various states in the area need to be compared and contrasted. Materials will be found in state reports, in the reports of federal agencies which distribute grants-in-aid, and in the findings cf various groups which have studied the general problem, as, for example, the Advisory Committee on Education which reported to the President in 1939, and the Committee on Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations set up by the Department of the Treasury."Much of the foregoing comment by a group of Southern political scientists with special reference to the Southern region is equally applicable to states in other sections of the country. It has often been alleged that the American tax system, in so far as it may be called a system at all, is a survival of the horse-and-buggy age. The thousands of small local taxing jurisdictions existing throughout the country—some 165,000 of them—are striking evidence of our antiquated methods of levying and collecting taxes. In Pennsylvania alone—and many other states are in a worse condition—there are approximately 5,200 local units of government, half of them school districts, and all of them with the power to tax and to incur debt.