The Redwood Gazette

Income Tax 'Bunk'

Enemies of the proposed income tax amendment to the state constitution apparently will go to any extreme to defeat the measure. And saddest fact of the fight is that certain journals which like to pose in the limelight as the farmer's most sincere friends are leading the fight.
These enemies argue something like this-"We know that the farmer is over-taxed and that something should be done about it; probably an income tax is the best method of relieving the burden on real estate but HORRORS we must not enact the proposed amendment because it does not provide that the tax shall be a replacement tax, consequently the governor, whoever he is after November, and the legislators, whoever are elected, are certain to squander the money raised by the tax. The farmer will just have to get along two more years until an amendment which suits our fancy can be passed."
Behind this slander is the unprinted thought, "If we can stall the farmers off another two years, maybe they will forget their tax burden. Or the amendment can be defeated in the house on the plea that it was rejected once by the voters. At least our backers will escape paying a state income tax for two more years."
And so they make much ado about one manufacturing plant moving from Wisconsin "because the income tax made the operations there unprofitable" avoiding mention of the fact that no income tax was collected from this plant unless it made profits and purposely forgetting the hosts of farmers who have lost their farms partly because of tax burdens-which certainly overshadow the loss of one manufacturing plant.
But the most absurd argument comes from the Minneapolis Journal which contends that the defeat of LaFollette in Wisconsin is a revolt against the income tax. We suppose the upset in Maine, then, was also a revolt against an income tax and if Governor Floyd B. Olson and even President Herbert Hoover are defeated this fall, that, too, will be attributable not to a revolt against conditions but against income taxes. Strangely enough the Wisconsin income tax became a law in 1911. Twenty years later voters "revolt" against it, they would have us believe.
So many statistics and opinions have been brought out of Wisconsin and mixed to suit one side or the other of this question that they probably will neither help nor hurt the issue. However, it is enlightening to rural voters that the rural press is almost 100 per cent in favor of the amendment. Here is an enlightening discussion of the Wisconsin situation taken from the Mankato Free Press:
"Wisconsin collected in 1929 in Income Tax for state purposes $9,832,792. General taxes for state purposes amounted to $5,233,723. A total of $15,066,515.
"The state levy on general property in Minnesota for the five years 1910 to 1914 (the much-touted "pre-war" period) averaged $5,330,037. For the five years 1925 to 1929 (our "prosperity" years) it averaged $12,697,575. The increase was over $7,300,000.
"The Wisconsin state levy on general property for the 1910-1914 period averaged $4,900,977 . . . just a little under Minnesota's. The levy for the 1925-1929 period averaged, $2301,598, a reduction from the earlier period of $2,600,000. In two years out of the last ten Wisconsin has had no general tax levy for state purposes.
"So while Minnesota's state levy was going up more than seven million dollars (and gross earnings and iron ore taxes went up, too) Wisconsin's came down more than two and a half million! Total collections from the Wisconsin income taxe during the 1925-1929 period averaged $17,011,200. The 40 per cent which went to the state averaged $6,804,481. Add this to her grand tax levy, and we find that our sister state collected in direct taxes and income taxes some three and a half million dollars less a year for state purposes than we did in direct taxes alone. The comparison is complicated by the fact that Wisconsin has not our system of state aid to school, has not the gross earnings and iron ore taxes that we have and finances her highways out of the county rather than state funds. But the comparison is all in her favor, so far as state expenditures go."
Apparently the political claims of political parties are about as reliable as their promises. Every state and every county has been claimed by two or three parties this year, usually by an "overwhelming majority."