Henderson Daily Dispatch

Sales Tax Repeal To Be Sought Fair Tax Association Aims At An Extra Session To Undo the Big Levy

Daily Dispatch Bureau In the Sir Walter Hotel. Raleigh, Aug. 4.-Receiving their charter yesterday afternoon the North Carolina Fair Tax Association will set out immediately on a campaign to make the recently enacted sales tax so unpopular that a special session of the General Assembly which first enacted it will be called to repeal it.

J. Paul Leonard, remembered well as secretary o the old merchants association, is executive director of the North Carolina Fair Tax Association, and he will do the directing from Statesville. The charter calls for the home office in Greensboro, but Mr. Leonard's personal quarters will be in Statesville. Representative D. E. Turner, of Iredell, retiring president of the North Carolina Hardware Association, is president of the association. The incorporators are James H. Womble, of Winston-Salem; H. G. Strader, of Reidsville; and W. R. Spainhour, of Hickory.

The immediate purpose is the abolition of the sales tax. The newly chartered organization has license to get into other business, but its interest will be "to educate, advise, instruct, and inform the citizenship of the State on matters of government, public policy, and particularly taxation....To engage in any and all lawful activities having for their purpose the repeal of the general sales tax in North Carolina and the prevention of its enactment at any future date."

The Fair Tax Association is advantaged now by the public's interest as a tax-payer. The general sales tax has been made a consumers' burden and the merchants and their allies, the purchasers, have at last common cause. The time is not set for the special session, but Mr. Leonard thinks it is not going to be such a tremendous job to repeal the act. In (Continued on Page Two.)
Sales Tax Repeal
To Be Sought

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that opinion he does not find a concurrence from his successor in the merchants association, Willard L. Dowell. Mr. Dowell almost beat the tax by his own efforts, but he never could think repeal would be easy. "Big Business won't let it be repealed," he said.

But Mr. Leonard thinks there is more little than big business and the little ones will outvote the big ones.

The moment the great public feels the

[vocative pinching he of believes pennies The it will campaign becom is memorial repealing designed to the will raise act determine mighty the very petition size of the the call for the extraor dinary session.]

Senator John W. Sinsdale, of Wake who introduced the luxury tax measure of 1931, does not agree that there will be any repeal. He was not a general sales taxer, but he thinks the average man will like the relief under the present act so well that repealing it will be a futile enterprise.

Of course, the repealers have one great barrier to push away. There is the State's credit in New York. The certainty of a balanced budget has revolutionized the precarious trade relationships with the bankers. Any proposal to repeal would have to be met by a suggestion of the repealers.

They would be driven to find some of the sources of revenue which will replete the losses suffered by repeal. The repealers say that can be done but unless there is an enormous trend upward in business there isn't anything yet that looks likely enough as a source of revenue to pin a State's fate to it, leaders say.

The sales tax may be less unpopular as an accomplished fact than as an academic question setting legislators by the ears.

Mr. Leonard, whose business is to repeal, says repealing can be done. And he would fuse those fellows in suffering the merchants and their customers. He has no doubt that his associates will arouse enough of these to guarantee a quick retreat from the position that controlled the legislature last spring.