The Wilmington morning star., 1943-01-21
BY wEsTBROoK PEGLER


BY WESTBROOK PEGLER
NEW YORK.-Apparently more in sorrowful
patience with miserable sinner than in
mighty anger, the Treasury department sends
nne Press Service Bulletin Number $780, which
purports to put me in error in accusing the
department of plain larceny in its plan to
collect the five per cent withholding or VIC
tory income tax on individual income earned
in 1912.
The authority under which the treasury
collects this withholding or victory tax reads,
substantially, as follows: There shall be col
lected for each taxable year beginning after
December 81, 1912, victory tax of five per
cent" and so forth. It does not say that
this tax shall be collected on any income
occurring before December 81. 1t says in
after December 81 1912. meaning, at the
earliest. January l, 1943.
All tax language is obscure and even the
office workers OF the internal revenue have
difficulty and, like humble students of revel-
ations. accept the meanings and interpreta-
tions handed down to them by the scholars
in Washington. If the language of a law
says one thing and the Treasury says it must
be interpreted in the light of some other law,
ruling or regulation and by this process to
contradict itself, they bow to the greater wis
dom and enforce it SO. Literalists and heretics
who insist that each law and each paragraph
and word means what it says, and nothing
else, run risk of error and damnation.
Under the Treasury's Interpretation, if your
pay roll period runs from the 10th to the
25th of the month, and your pay day thus fell
on January 10, you had to pay the five per
cent tax on wages or other income earned
on six days. or one whole working week. of
l942 Even il. as an extreme example, the
pay roll period ran for one year. from Janu-
ary l. 1912. to January l, 1943, you would
have to pay the tax on entire years in
come, minus one days pay, although the
law says the tax shall be levied for each tax
able year beginning after December 81,
1912"
An official of the Treasury department has
written me in a kind spirit of appeal to my
better nature, touched no doubt but not vsibly
outraged by my use of the words larceny"
and theft in this connection.
Knowing that you do not wish to misin.
terpret the rulings of the Treasury" he writes.
I am inclosing a copy of the press release
OF December 81. l would call your attention
to example two of this release
But example two says only that the tax
shall not be collected on 1912 income if the
pay roll period ended on the last day of
the year, which seems to me to make no
change in my Interpretation. Of course, it
should not be collected. Why should it be,
/ tax became effective?
On the other hand examples one and three
of this release plainly reserve for the Treas
ury right to tax income earned in 1912,
contrary to the language of the tax law,
and in my home-brewed logic that means
that the Treasury has decided t, take lot
of money from millions of citizens to which
it has no legal right. According to the same
logic and the morality behind it, taking some
thing that belongs to someone else, Or some
millions of others, is stealing, and in viola
ton of a wel-known commandment, and if
done by the reasury department of the U.S.A
is bad example TO the people who might
reasonably decide to take up stealing as
regular line Of work and get into serious
trouble in all innocence.
The definition of the starting hour of this
tax is one point in our tax law which is
remarkably distinct and the dumbest citizen
can read and understand it. Vet these schol-
ars who have STEPPED themselves in the mys.
teries of such writs for years and years as
tax accountants have undertaken to say that
when you place this page over some other
page Oh tHe lax laws, lJS meaning ladies' out
and another meaning shows through, quite
to the contrary. Their arguments are rem
iniscent OF the wild debates on the town
green at Dayton, Tenn, during the monkey
trial, when kiver-kiver scholars came down
out OF the mountains and in from all over
the country to insist on their many and con-
trary interpretations of the Holy Bible.
Tax laws should be subject to no doubts
and speculations, nor should they require the
services OF priesthood or experts not all
OIL them in agreement on all points.
The Bible scholars of Dayton exhorting,
threatening and sweating in the dusk, each
held that all who rejected their respective
meanings stood in danger of hell fire eternal,
and it was a terrifying experience because
they were all so positive and so far apart,
and wrong guess might be fatal though
utterly sincere.
But it should not be that the common citizen
of this little republic stand in danger of fine
ana or imprisonment for obeying the plain
language OF tax law which to the wise men
@, OF the Treasury means the opposite of what
it says "-'''