The West Virginia News

ANOTHER FARM TAX PLAN
By J. C. Royle,
(in the Washington Star.)

Financiers and business men who recognize the fact that the farmer represents a tremendous part of the buying power of the United States and that his condition affects every other line of commerce and industry, have determined not to help the farmer, but to help the farmer help himself.

They hope to do this through the medium of an organization called the American Association of Scientific Taxation, just organized, but already numbering among its members some of the most influential business men of the country. These men hold that the farmer is being taxed to death, and that to a certain degree it is his own fault, since he has voted a lot of destructive taxes on himself. They assert that the tariff is unable to help him materially, in view of the protection afforded things he must buy, but that real relief can come from readjustment of state taxes, which, in the main, the farmer has voted upon himself.

Readjustment and relief, they assert, can come through the taxation on location value of land rather than on labor value, Mr. Charles T. Root, economist, and publisher, who is prominent in the new organization, explains its policy as follows:

"It is vital that the farmer be given substantial relief else the purchasing power of the nation will receive a jolt that will be felt in our industrial and manufacturing centers. The American farmer is the great market for American merchandise. In every state taxes today are levied on evidences of the farmer's labor. If he has a better herd of cattle, better buildings, better fertilized fields, better fences—all evidences of his own labor—his taxes are higher. In the cities, on the other hand, these forms of unscientific taxation do not bear so heavily.

"The value of the farm depends on its fertility and the farmer's labor. The value of city land is in value of location. The owner of a city lot can and often does let it lie year after year in weeds and tin cans and yet it goes up and up in value without a stroke of work being applied to it. Thus the same tax system which piles taxes on the farmer by reason of his labor on his farm places a premium on the vacant or inadequately improved city land."

Mr. Root pointed out in this connection that pavements, sewers, water mains and other improvements had been made available to 700 miles of unimproved property in Greater New York, the most congested city of the country.

"This means," he continued, "that farmers are paying in taxes on their labor a sum which is being exempted to city land owners who put no labor into their vacant lots. The last census gives the value of all farm property, machinery, buildings, live stock and lands at $78,000,000,000. Most of this is pure labor value. The value of the raw farm is only 10 to 20 per cent of the whole, so that it is conservative to say that the farmers of the United States are paying taxes on about $60,000,000,000 annually on their own labor and to their own states. This is no small item in the farmers' prosperity or their purchasing power. The cities are getting an unfair advantage.

"The quickest and surest way to help the farm situation is to make the farmer more prosperous by untaxing him. The cities and the manufacturing centers should lead in the move to untax the farmer, in the various states, for if they do not the purchasing power of nearly half our population will shrink and prosperity of business and industry will shrink with it."

Prof. Irving Fisher, head of the department of economics of Yale University, heartily endorses the principles of land value taxation outlined by Mr. Root.