Let's Get Busy and Get Rid of The Capital Stock Tax

Bg Jacft Dionne

According to news reports from Washington, there is strong probability that the income tax will be cut down from $300,000,000 to $500,000,000.

The business interests of the nation should unite at once in an. effort to make the elimination of the obnoxious Capital Stock Tax furnish $80,000,000 of that sum, for THAT was the total amount of the Capital Stock Tax for last year.

The Capital Stock Tax was instituted as a special source of war-expense income, and is denominated on the Governmental books as an excise tax, when as a matter of fact it has now become a property tax on the eqtire assets of a corporation.

In the first place the business interests did not take this particular tax seriously, since it seemed so much smaller and unimportant than the income tax. The Capital Stock Tax is set at one dollar per year for every $1000 of Capital Stock.

But the Government has seen fit to interpret that as meaning the entire value of your possessions, and not simply your capital stock, and they were recently upheld in, that contention by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Ray Copper Case. A dollar a year on every thousand dollars a corporation owns, is the new interpretation.

And it is reported on the best authority that the Capital Stock Tax section is preparing to immediately investigate the present valuation of the property of some 300,000 corporations, in order that they may now collect on this new basis of figuring.

This immediately becomes a much higher tax than was ever intended or anticipated, and becomes both a burden and a menace to business.

Let's get the Capital Stock Tax law repealed at once.

The way to do it is to have all the business organizations possible petition their law makers at Washington to that effect. It should be done through all the well known business organizations, such as the Chambers of Commerce, the noonday Service Clubs in each city, etc.

Let every lumberman suggest to the business organizations to which he belongs that they get busy right now and petition the withdrawal of the Capital Stock Tax.

It would be a real benefit to overtaxed American business.