Such a tax inevitably discourages capital investment that is so important for the development of new energy resources. There is a definite psychological effect on investors who know that any success will be subject to a tax that could consume almost the entire profit.
Effluent taxes are a license to pollute. If the tax is low or moderate there is little incentive to provide treatment prior to discharge. If the tax is too high some firms, because of size, marginal nature or age, may be forced to close. This can, and does, happen under existing water quality programs. But such shutdowns are directly related to water quality. Shutdowns due to effluent taxes which ignore water quality and produce no tangible benefits are economically and socially unacceptable.
The class action concept is misdirected and does not meet the overriding need of establishing a workable method to prevent frauds and deceptions. At best, class actions are only remedial to the consumer. At worst, they are a deceptive promise of prevention which the consumer is unlikely to see fulfilled. This is especially true of the low-income consumer who is the typical prey of unscrupulous operators, particularly in inner-city areas.
The truly attractive targets would be the overwhelming majority of businesses which are honest, ethical, and legitimate—large companies because of their assets and small merchants because of their vulnerabilities.
We oppose the Medicare program because foreign experience has shown that socialized medicine is harmful to both the doctor and the patient, primarily to the patient. He suffers most.
If my company were compelled to raise all of our female rates in this plant to the male rates in question, it would seriously jeopardize the competitive position of this plant with its competitors located in other states employing all females in these jobs.
[The Fair Labor Standards Act] would create chaos in business never yet known to us.... It sets an all-time high in crackpot legislation. Let me make it very clear that I am not opposed to the social theory.... No decent American citizen can take exception to this attitude. What I do take exception to is any approach to a solution of this problem which is utterly impractical and in operation would be much more destructive than constructive to the very purposes which it is designed to serve.
The enactment of the foregoing bill as introduced would, in our opinion, eventually ruin the original home thrift institutions, such as ours, and approximately 11,000 others in the United States holding the savings of 10,000,000 of our people in the aggregate sum of approximately $8,000,000,000.
…the bill holds little or no relief for the home owner and threatens real harm to the home-owning family.
New York State’s past independent pioneering activities in social legislation, while commendable in many respects…have already produced discriminatory differentials between the cost of doing business in New York and such costs in neighboring States [sic]. We can see no justification for deliberately increasing those differentials at this time by continuance of such pioneering.
