Henderson Daily Dispatch

GOVERNOR BLOCKS
TAX UPON MEALS

House Committee Changed Positions on Issue Three Times Tuesday

Daily Dispatch Bureau,
In the Sir Walter Hotel,
By J. C. BASKERVILL

Raleigh, Feb. 11.—The peculiar gyrations of the finance committee in its consideration of the sales tax on meals are being laid in large measure to intervention by Governor Clyde R. Hoey, who is said to have insisted that the Democratic party's campaign pledge to remove this tax be redeemed.

The committee set something of a record in the matter of about-facing, reversing itself no less than three times in the same day, finally winding up just exactly where it started out—with meals exempt from the three per cent levy which has caused more discussion and controversy than all North Carolina's other tax laws put together.

To begin with, there will be practically no sentiment against exempting meals. The party platform specifically named them among the things from which the tax was to be taken.

Then the committee members began to consider the $363,000 which the tax has been yielding annually. The need for more revenue was pressing. Here was something concrete upon which hands could be laid.

So sentiment grew, but at first it was planned to put a tax only on meals costing more than fifty cents. Members drew really vivid pictures of the economic royalist paying four bits for a meal and not paying a cent tax, while the much-pitted "little man" was putting out on his purchase of beans and bread. So it was decided to levy on the higher bracket diners. Change Number One.

Then it was decided that the party pledge wasn't such a much, anyhow and on went the tax on every kind of meal, no matter how much or how little it cost. Change Number Two.

Finally, it is said, the governor sent word to the effect that party pledges are things to be lived up to and not casually tossed into the waste basket. Hence the third complete turn-about.