Friends in the House of Representatives

Friends in the House of Representatives have informed me that not only was the pending bill passed without the members generally knowing what is in it were given little opportunity to find out what it meant and what it will do. I have been told that complicated1 questions of the type to which we used to devote days and even weeks of study when I was working on tax bills, were rushed to a vote in the committee meetings after only a few minutes of consideration.

It seems obvious to me, therefore, that members of the Senate cannot find out what is in this huge bill during the course of three weeks of ^hearings and that members of the Senate will be asked to take it on faith—not even faith in theirs fellow members of the Senate, but faith that Treasury Department technicians and their outside advisers, who drew the various sections of the bill, put into it things which we would want included.

I, for one, am not inclined to perform any such act of faith. It seems to me the best thing for us to do is to extend the corporate income tax ratq of 52 percent for another year, as is , done in th£ pending bill, and postpone the tax revision plan- for more thorough study. We badly need the $1,200,(XX),000 of additional revenue which this tax extension would produce. We can ill afford the tax reductions totalling $1,400,000,000 which are included in the bill. But, more important, we do not want to take action which might give large windfalls to some taxpayers who do not need them». and at the same time unexpectedly penalize others, like the Virginia corporation which I was told might lose more than threequarters of a million dollars in one lump sum if the bill is passed as sent to us from the House.

Mrs. Susie Pullen was home for the week end, returning to Front Royal on Monday.