Word: businessmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Taxes. The Administration's tax-reform program, which was originally supposed to go to Capitol Hill as early as September, has indefinitely been held up, and many businessmen take that as a sign of presidential indecision. Actually, the principal reason for the delay is that the Administration wants to get the energy fight out of the way first. In any case, it has inspired some wild-and false-stories in executive suites. Says J. Edwin Matz, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co.: "It's rumored that the tax bill has things in it so horrendous...
Carter does intend to propose taxing all capital gains at full ordinary-income rates (at present, only half the profit on sales of assets such as stock and real estate is usually taxed). Businessmen complain that that would inhibit the very investment the President says he is so anxious to promote. Says James L. Moody Jr., president of Hannaford Bros. Co., a Maine food distributor: "The chief incentive to invest in business is to make money. Such proposals will slow down businessmen's investments in the U.S. at a time when countries like the Soviet Union and Japan...
...corporate tax rate from the present 48% to 46% or less; more generous investment tax credits; some easing of the double tax on dividends, which are taxed first as corporate profits and then as individual income to shareholders. Strangely, these concessions have made next to no impression on businessmen, who seem unwilling to believe anything good about the tax bill until it is sent to Congress with Carter's blessing...
...increases has been pretty much stuck at around 6% annually since the spring of 1975, and most economists predict that it will continue at about that pace through next year; some recent easing has been illusory because it has reflected a drop in food prices that will not last. Businessmen complain that Carter seems to have no idea how to bring the rate down; the "anti-inflation" policy he announced last April turned out to be largely a list of regulatory and review measures...
...Businessmen have a valid point in contending that Carter could have refrained from politically inspired moves that are likely to make inflation worse: increasing farm subsidies, for example. Arthur Okun, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and sometime Carter adviser, calculates that the Administration's own acts will add more than a point to the 1978 inflation rate...