YOU’RE SENTENCED TO A WEEKLY PAY REDUCTION FOR ALL OF YOUR WORKING LIFE. YOU’LL HAVE TO SERVE THAT SENTENCE UNLESS YOU HELP REVERSE IT NOVEMBER 3.
Effective January 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt New Deal law to make a 1 percent deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. You might get this money back . . . but only if Congress decides to make the appropriations for this purpose.
This is the largest tax bill in history. And to call it ‘social security’ is a fraud on the workingman…. I am not exaggerating the folly of this legislation. The saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax.
Imagine the vast army of clerks which will be necessary to keep these records.
The actual fact will be, in almost every case, that the whole tax will be borne either by the employe [sic] or by the consumer through higher prices. That is the history of all such taxes. This is because the tax is imposed in such a way that, if the employer is to stay in business, he must shift the tax to some one else.
Do not forget this: such an excessive tax on payrolls is beyond question a tax on employment. In prosperous times it slows down the advance of wages and holds back re-employment. In bad times it increases unemployment, and unemployment breaks wage scales.
There is every probability that the cash they pay in will be used for current deficits and new extravagances. We are going to have trouble enough to carry out an economy program without having the Treasury flush with money drawn from the workers…
Too long have we introduced carelessly into the stream of our national life alien philosophies of government control and foreign ideas of repression of the individual that have no place in this land of freedom. It is time to rout them out. It is time for all of us to realize that we want and intend to have for our own and later generations the American pattern of life and the American freedom of opportunity which these foreign ideas and theories and plans have been shouldering out of the picture.
I submit, however, that no man who himself has any practical acquaintance with business processes and methods who is not utterly blinded by partisan political considerations can examine the Securities Act, the Stock Exchange Act, the successive revenue acts in recent years, the Social Security Act, the Public Utilities Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and many of the arbitrary regulations devised under a dozen other recent acts and arrive at any verdict other than they cripple and retard business rather than help revive it. The fact is even so clear that it is hard to keep from wondering if such a result were not actually intended.
The Form and nature of the old-age insurance plan, is very questionable; the whole matter should have received careful study by an expert commission. It would mean an added tax burden equal to nearly half of the existing total Federal tax burden.
