We would strenuously object to any bill that would make it unlawful to allow water from the anthracite mines or breakers to enter the streams adjacent thereto because, as stated herein, they do not adversely affect the streams and there is no other place where these waters can go…..The anthracite industry would be put out of business overnight if such laws were passed and enforced and it would still leave the problem unsolved. If no new source of pollution (especially acid mine water) is permitted, as proposed in H. R. 123, except with final approval of the Surgeon General, it may eventually prevent the opening of new mines, whose mineral products might be sorely needed in our economy, especially in being ready to secure our Nation in its problems of defense.
If you were to force the industry to spend $300,000,000 or 50 cents on every ton they mined, you would destroy the industry.… I am sure that the committee realizes that the very life of many industries is involved in this question of industrial pollution. In the first place, industrial America, with its hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, is in fact the backbone of our American way of life.
There are economic variables also. For one or two mills, the sale of a byproduct may help finance a method of treatment, the cost which is otherwise prohibitive. Because the quantities are huge, however, the market for the byproduct is soon saturated; other mills must find some other method. Again, the cost of treatment for one mill may be so great compared to the cost for others as to destroy its ability to compete, resulting in ruin for the investors and migration for the employees.
Unequivocally state that to blanket the Nation with a law such as is here proposed, delegating almost despotic power to political officers of the Nation, will work irretrievable loss to the industry which I represent, and will create a threat which cannot but seriously affect the continued production of metals and minerals so essential to the security and prosperity of our people.
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.
[H]igh inheritance and estate taxes do compel the sale of assets, with consequent changes in ownership, shifts in management and generally dislocating effects.
In other countries, the problem is handled by taking the necessary sum each year from the current taxes. Otherwise the load would get so big as to be a menace. On the other hand, if industry is burdened with too heavy taxes, the result may be more unemployment in the future, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
So-called social security [will] mean industrial in-security.
[Social Security will ] impose a crushing burden on industry and labor [and] establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance in competition with private business.
Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought in here so insidiously designed so as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.
