Mcallen Daily Press

The President's message of July 1, asking for enactment of a "steeply graduated excess profits tax," may have been good political maneuvering, but it served no other useful purpose. It was timed for the beginning of the new taxes on various commodities, and it was cleverly worded to suggest that some people might not be paying their fair share of the federal taxes unless a drastic new tax was imposed.

So far as concerns the taxation of excess profits, if and when there is to be any excess profit, the message was wholly unnecessary. Action had already been taken pointing to this end. In reporting the tax bill which became the Revenue Act of 1940 the Ways and Means Committee had instructed the Treasury to prepare the necessary estimates and suggestions on this subject, for consideration in the next special or regular session of Congress.

Senator LaFollette offered an excess profits tax amendment. It was not accepted by the conference committee, on the ground that the subject required more careful and complete consideration than could then be given. But the conference committee also instructed the Treasury to be ready with its material on excess profits taxation not later than October 1, 1940.

The subject has therefore been before Congress, and in the minds of members of both Houses, for some weeks at least. The Treasury has presumably been engaged in the operations required to comply with the requests made by two separate Congressional committees.

In his message of July 1, the President merely recommended that Congress do something which it had already set out, on its own initiative, to do. The only result, aside from the political reverberations, may be to induce loyal followers to act more hastily than had been originally intended, and thus to produce a more imperfect law than would otherwise have been written.

Haste rather than deliberation has always been a characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt's procedure. His followers in Congress have unfortunately been entirely too much disposed to fall in with this policy which has produced.