Word: morgenthau
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bald, bashful, nervous Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had mapped his campaign like a general getting ready for a spring offensive. He had stored up quantities of materiel for verbal war. His scouts had reconnoitered the House and Senate. This week, as his adding machines rolled forward, Mr. Morgenthau invaded Congress with the greatest army of tax proposals ever seen on earth...
...timing was perfect. U.S. taxpayers have started filing returns for 1941. When they get a look at Mr. Morgenthau's spring invasion, 1941's record taxes will look like a minor skirmish with a band of Indians armed with bows & arrows...
Last Tuesday's headlines screamed that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was asking Congress to double income taxes. He wants to up them $7,600,000,000 a year in war revenues, thereby hitting the pocketbooks of all except the very poor, and "mopping up" part of the surplus earnings of persons with incomes under $1,500. This is specially designed to "prevent people from engaging in the futile effort to buy more goods than can be produced...
What would happen to the pocketbooks of the country if Morgenthau didn't take the money out in taxes is good material for a major nightmare. What purchasing power the people could keep would be undermined by a wage-price spiral; small business would be wiped out by the sky-rocketing of wholesale prices; and Washington alone would have enough lucre to make even the smallest investment...
...first essential to the resumption of private investment after this war is to avoid uncontrolled inflation now. Morgenthau has taken the first big step. Alvin H. Hansen, Professor of Political Economy at Littauer Center, prophesies that "we may be compelled to spend one-half our national income on the war effort." This is a post-war necessity that must be taken care of while the war is still being fought...