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University Daily Kansan
Monday, Dec. 9, 1963
Gravy to Grits
The publisher of Tennessee Ernie Ford's latest book decided "From Grits To Gravy" wasn't an appropriate enough title. Reversed, the words of the title aren't at all out of line for a book on our current tax program.
By April 15, more than 70 million family heads, individuals and businesses constituting our government's basic source of revenue will fill out their income tax reports and pay up for 1963. Their task will be tougher than ever. There are more forms, more demands for bookkeeping detail. Thousands of Americans will pay more than they legally owe, because they can't understand the complexities of the law. Countless others will shortchange the government and get away with it because there are not enough Internal Revenue agents to audit their returns.
OUR PRESENT TAX structure, adapted during World War II to direct the nation's resources to winning the war, is shot full of reductions, exemptions and favored treatment for special groups. For example, private corporations must hand over a 52 per cent tax before they can use their profits to finance future operations or pay dividends, yet farm cooperatives doing a 13-billion-dollar annual merchandising business are virtually exempt from this tax and thus able to undersell private competitors.
In 1961 the IRS disclosed this shocking fact; out of $383 billion total personal income only $167 billion was taxed.
Because of this narrowing tax base, those unfortunate people caught in it are in an evertightening squeeze to make up for the money lost to the free riders. Is it any wonder taxpayers
take refuge in any gimmick available or even try to beat the game in order to reduce this burden?
OUR INCOME TAX law, which back in 1913 was a 16-page pamphlet, now consists of 1,006 pages of fine print, plus enough additional volumes of interpretations, regulations and rulings to fill a five-foot shelf and then some. What everybody pays or need not pay is tucked away in this endless verbiage, much of which is virtually incomprehensible even to experts.
Several years ago a Washington newspaper sent a half dozen reporters to IRS headquarters and had them present identical salary and expense items to a half dozen different IRS experts. The reporters received six different answers as to the amount of tax owed.
UNLESS HE CAN afford the services of a professional tax expert, a citizen is lost if he has to argue the meaning of the tax law with the IRS. It involves dickering, horse-trading and compromising on the many controversial points which arise, for the IRS is not a judicial agency but one designed to collect as much money as it legally can.
It appears that, rather than a tax cut, tax simplification and re-distribution can dull a danger point which is piercing the tax morality of large numbers of our citizenry. Only by adopting amendments aimed at eliminating tax preferences and favors and focused on creating a revenue system which is fair, equitable, and neutral in impact between similar dollars of income can taxpayer confidence be restored.
Ron Morgan
Not True
Editor:
The newspaper published by you gives true representation to the activities of the various student organizations of the campus.
I would like to bring to your notice the affair of the International Club of which I am secretary. The members of the executive committee — Rab Malik, president; Milan Loupal, vice-president; Milie Yumang, social secretary; and Ramesh Gandhi, treasurer—have conveyed to me that they feel that I should be relieved from the post of secretary without any warning or investigation.
If they have grievances let them appoint an investigation committee to see the affair in true light and the punishment recommended by the investigation committee be carried out. The above would be a constitutional procedure.
Since they have not done anything like that I feel it is my duty to make the members aware of the fact that the affairs of the International Club are not true.
Navinchandra Sanghavi Bombay, India graduate student
A Kind of Mourning Editor:
The People Say...
Perhaps the most opportune time to examine people can be found while they are immersed in a period of stress. The recent death of John F. Kennedy, one-time President of the United States, presented one such period.
The most impressive thing, to me at least, was not the fact that people expected to obtain some fringe benefits from the death of Kennedy. On Wednesday, Dec. 4, five letters appeared in the UDK. Two of these were from people who seemed to expect that life should not halt for all of us just because one man died. They praised (or damned...) the behavior of teachers as regards tests and their postponement. What does the death of Kennedy have to do with test schedules? I can see no relation, unless the individual is suggesting that every time he wants to avoid a test we should have the President of the United States shot.
Everyone reacts differently to a tragic event. I would rather laugh than cry; "the moving finger writes" and what good are all the tears in the world going to do? Sure, you cry your tears, I'll tell my jokes. We mourn in different manners; is my manner any less mourning? I think not. The important thing is that in these times we not lose the ability to live, that we not make our lives one long funeral because of one man's death.
All men are allotted but one thing by life, death. Are we to weep through all of our lives? If we mourn for everyone who has the ability to die, we shall weep forever. Be glad, rejoice (if you believe in heaven, which you certainly must if you, as one did, ask God to help us) that God has called John F. Kennedy to His side. If you don't believe in a heaven, choose for yourself whether you
wish to laugh or cry, then follow this. I made my choice, I will laugh, but I shall not judge those who mourn in other manners.
Lewis W. Wood
Canal Zone junior
On Friday, Nov. 22, the nation bore the brunt of a great tragedy on its shoulders. It had lost its President. John Kennedy was a good American, and a fine leader—from no matter what angle one looked at him. The fact that one man felt he was a poor President is no excuse for the President's murder. Supposedly America is a land where we tolerate one another's views, and reject or accept them with our votes. In light of this, Kennedy's death was a blow to the democratic system of government.
His death was a slap at American values; his death is to be regretted. But I am sure John Kennedy would not have wished us to mourn his death as we did. He is dead. Reality is here, and the earth still revolves.
Because one man dies, the world does not stop. We should simply bow our heads and go about our business. To me it is tragic that we called off classes, and that we postponed a football game. Both of these decisions cost many people time and money; they were not necessary.
Reality Is Here Editor:
Dailu Transan
111 Flint Hall
University of Kansas student newspaper
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
UNiversity 4-3198, business office
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Blaine King ... Editorial Editor
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16. 1912 Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East St. New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International, Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Mike Miller ... Managing Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bob Brooks ... Business Manager
Respect for the dead may be fine, but reality is always here. I do believe John Kennedy would not have wished the normal business of the country to stop just because he died. It should not have stopped. When a man dies, he is gone. We should look to the future and what it will bring.
Lawrence sophomore
Justin Hill
Paternal Concern
Editor:
I am relieved to read that the administration of the University was not embarrassed by a poor student turn-out at the Nov. 25 convocation in memory of Mr. Kennedy. Continuous paternal concern for our public seemliness is always reassuring, even when it is manifested so sublimely and tactfully as in the vehicle "publicly" submitted to the Kansan.
Arthur M. Harkins
Ottawa graduate student
"It's Terrible How Intolerant People Are Getting"
BOOK REVIEWS
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE BOOK OF NATURAL WONDERS, by the editors of American Heritage (American Heritage, $16.50).
This is a magnificent—a strong word, but it applies in this case—book, and one beautifully timed for the Christmas season. What better gift than this rich volume about the American land, with paintings, full color and black-and-white photographs, and text by people who know their United States?
The chapters are by Peter Matthiessen, William O. Douglas, Jan de Hartog, Bruce Catton, Paul Engle, Wallace Stegner, George R. Stewart and Harold Gilliam. That is an impressive array, and the writers were selected for their knowledge of American regions.
As for the regional breakdown, the editors, who were headed on this operation by Alvin M. Josephy Jr., the chapters deal with the Atlantic coast, the eastern forests, the southern lowlands, the Great Lakes, the prairie and plains, the mountains, the basin and desert, and the Pacific coast. The latter, by the way, includes those new American states—Alaska and Hawaii.
CAN ONE CATALOG EVERYTHING either in the land or in this book? Let's just say that you can pick up the book and find a rich topographical outline of the Great Smoky mountains. On another page you'll see Thomas Cole's romantic "The Last of the Mohicans." There are the peaks of the Wind River mountains in Wyoming, and the big bend of the Rio Grande. You can see Chimney Rock, great plains cattle, and the prairie buffalo as they must have looked to Francis Parkman.
Here are the majestic Grand Canyon and the parks of southern Utah, the Palisades of the Hudson and the sand dunes of Cape Cod, the big trees of California and the Okefenokee swamp, the Tetons and the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina, Death Valley and the seals of the Pacific, Diamond Head and the Snake River, the Oregon trail and the Black Hills, the forests of Wisconsin and the wheatlands of the Midwest.
The final photograph is not one to stir all hearts. It's Los Angeles, and the editors tell us that it may be the symbolic U.S.A. of 2000 A.D.-CMP
* * *
HATTER'S CASTLE, by A. J. Cronin (Pyramid, 75 cents).
Seldom does one find a book so permeated with the gloomy atmosphere of doom as Cronin's "Hatter's Castle." Its vintage is 1931, and maybe the grim mess the world had gotten itself into had an impact on the then young writer, who leaped into great fame after appearance of the book.
In theme it is not so socially oriented as either "The Stars Look Down" or "The Citadel." But its mood of Darwinian naturalism gives it certain resemblances to the novels of Hardy. The castle itself, an ugly old Gothic pile, contributes to a kind of romantic atmosphere, one which is rapidly dispelled by the story.
For A. J. Cronin describes here a Scottish family, a wealthy merchant who runs his brood as imperiously as any continental father of the time. So imperiously, in fact, that the conflict comes in the opposition of his spoiled son and the rest of the miserable bunch.
It's a constantly engrossing story, and it has been a popular library novel for many years. Cronin is a writer in decline, but his early books are worth reading, and here's another one now available in paperback.