Word: excessively
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Congress adjourned after passing the $4.5 billion emergency tax bill, it made a solemn promise to itself: as soon as it comes back after the November elections, it would slap a retroactive excess profits tax on U.S. business to "take the profits...
Nobody, least of all any responsible U.S. businessman, quarrels with anti-profiteering objectives. But is an excess profits tax the best way to accomplish it? The argument, unfortunately, has been obscured by such foggy conceits as New York's Fair Dealing Senator Herbert H. Lehman's plea for a tax because, "The mobilization of the profits dollar is just as essential as the mobilizing of human lives...
...experience of two World Wars has proved that an excess profits tax is not an efficient way of "mobilizing the profits dollar" or, for that matter, of capturing unreasonable war profits. Even Harry Truman's own tax experts privately confess that in both wars the tax proved inherently unfair, vastly difficult to administer, and an unsatisfactory revenue producer. Last week Tax Expert Beardsley Ruml told the American Bar Association in Washington that the clamor for an excess profits tax is "a hysterical manifestation of schizophrenic masochism." Nobody, he added, had ever yet been able to devise a good...
What Is Normal? The best argument for an excess profits tax is the vague one that it helps morale in wartime. By imposing a heavy burden on business, the Government supposedly makes such burdens on the general public as rationing and price & wage controls easier to bear. To some extent, the tax also tends to cut down non-military production since there is no incentive to boost it as long as any additional profit is to be siphoned off. But the few arguments for the tax are far outweighed by those against...
...worst feature of an excess profits tax is that it penalizes new and expanding companies. And no tax can be drafted that does not favor one industry over another or give unfair advantages to individual companies within an industry...