The Wrangell sentinel., 1944-02-18
ON TE1E WASHINGTON
 FRONT
By JACK sTNNETT

WASHINGTON The first rum 4. of that snowfall which is go- .ag to hit Congress March 15 al- .sady is being heard and Congress .s uncomfortable, if not downright Jared. So is the Treasury.
 The snowfall is of course, t b e ,a.nering avalanche of protests a. ,Ainst the complicated income -ax .orms. A number of Congressmen al-
 .dy have staggering files of let .5rs from constituents who have sAamined the tax forms and can ..-ake neither head nor tails of them.
 Representative DoughtOn, of So. Carolina, chairman of the House ways and means committee that shapes all the tax bills, has come ut with the declaration that he onsiders his sole objective in of ..ue now the business of simplify -.s the returns.
 At least three bills in prepara- ton are designed to make income tax paying merely a painless proc sss of dishing out the dough on paydays. But nothing can be done to cure the March 16 headache this
 ara collective headache that is .oiag to have to be endured by nearly 40,00O,0O0 persons.
 So serious does the Treasury con- slider the situation that Secretary Morgenthau already has taken the floor to inform the public that sim plifications are on the way and to promise it won't happen again. The Treasury drew up the forms, but .ue fault lies in the muddle of tax -aws passed by Congress.
 The greatest headache will come 10 those persons earning more than S3 900 a year for they will have to
 i out the long forms of four close y packed pages of questions, ans wers and figures. And there will be three forms of tax to compute the Victory tax, the normal tax and sur tax
 The ideal thing, and one some of the lawmakers are hoping to do, is eliminate returns altogether at least for wage earners. How much burden this would place on employers has not yet been determined and it may not be possible for that reason. The alternative would be a simple year end declaration of income earned, and taxes paid
 The Victory tax probably will be abolished altogether. 1t was planned originally to catch some 10,o0e, 900 lower bracket taxpayers who other wise wouldn't have paid anything, but it brings in less than $4so, ,eoS,- O00-a small portion of the 2e bil- lion tax revenue, considering the work involved.
 This leads too to a third planned simplification- closing the normal, surtax and victory tax into one sin gle rate, probably ranging from 22 to 8s per cent.
 Another proposal would extend ,le use of the short form to per sons making less than $5,ooo from a single source of income.
 All this doesn't souRd like very much, but just how much simplifi- cation would result will be appre- ciated by millions who have to wor- ry through the present forms be- fore March 15.
 < < $ E
 Regardless of the seemingly in- surmountable politcial difficulties and bitterness between England and India, there is apparently no hard feeling between the men of both countries who shoulder guns.
 A young British Tommy from Newbury, Eng, who escaped from a Nazi prison camp somewhere along the Polish border and is in Wash ington on an undisclosed mission, tells this story of cooperation a. mong the fighting men.
 Three hundred IRdian troops, oap- tured in North Africa. were brought into the camp. Soon after their ar rival, the Nazis punished the Brit ish troops already there fer some minor infractiOns of nrieOn ezmni