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in Belmont, ‘Mass., near the Birch Soci-
ety offices,

The National Taxpayers Union
(NTU), which claims 70,000 members
nationwide, is still another ultra-right
tax front. Paul Gann of Proposition 13ill
fame is the chairman of the board of
advisers of NTU. It has become the
clearinghouse for efforts in 31 states to

place referenda similar to Proposition

13 on the ballots this fall. NTU affiliates

have Succeeded already in. winning

property tax cut initiatives in Oregon,
chigan, Nebraska and Colorado.

NTU worked hard on behalf of an

ultra-right measure introduced by
Senator William Roth (R-De) and Rep.
Jack Kemp (R-NY) for an across-the-
board 33% cut in federal income taxes.

: bviously any across-the-board tax
cut will preserve or worsen the regres-
sive character of the tax system since a

far larger proportion of the benefits.

would go to the rich. The measure was
defeated in the Senate. 3

NTU hailed as a ‘tremendous vic-
tory, for.taxpayers’’.the tuition tax -ere-

_ dit bill introduced by Senator Daniel

_ Patrick Moynihan (D-NY). This bill

would have granted up to $500 for each
child a parent withdraws from public
school and enrolls in private school.
Congress passed a modified version
with benefits limited to higher educa-
tion. But the ultra-right will be back in
the 9th Congress seeking to widen the
beachhead for this measure which
would funnel federal tax funds to
lilywhite private schools set up to cir-
cumvent school desegregation.

‘James Dale Davidson, national

. chairman of NTU, told World Magazine

that NTU’s long-term aim is to get 34
states to memorialize Congress for an
amendment to the Constitution requir-
ing Congress and the President to ba-

lance the federal budget by ending defi-

cit Spending. Davidson said his group
with offices in Washington, D.C., has
70,000 members and a yearly budget in
excess of $1 million.

_ A“tax revolt” rally and crab feast at
the Parkville, Md., VF W hall one even-
ing recently showed how the right-wing
groups collaborate while seeking to
conceal their links to each other. The
purpose of the rally, sponsored by the
NTU affiliated ‘‘MR-13 Committee”’
was to launch a drive for one_million
signatures to place ‘Maryland Resolu-
tion 13”, identical. to Proposition 13, on
the Maryland ballot. The guests of
aay were Paul Gann and Davidson of

The turnout.for the rally, all-white,
was dismal and Gann attempted to pep
up the meeting with corn pone patriot-

_ ism. ‘Proposition 13 has done some-

thing for the pride of our nation,” he
said, his voice echoing in the nearly

empty VFW hall. “Weare getting up off
pean ends and taking a look into this
government. That’s the only difference
betiveen us and the people in Russia and
China.”

As he spoke, members of the John -

Birch Society handed copies of the Trim
Bulletin, official publication of the

TRIM Committee to every person who
entered the hall. The bulletin directed

its fire at the Humphrey-Hawkins Full:

Employment and. Balanced Growth

Act, branding it a scheme by the federal —

overnment to provide ‘“‘make-work
jobs” through “unlimited authorization
for spending your tax dollars.

Roy Chambers, chairman of the MR
13 Committee, who chaired the rally,

- candidly told World Magazine that the

Birchite ‘TRIM committee is not af-
filiated with the MR 13 committee. ‘‘But
some of our members work in both the
county and state campaigns and the
TRIM committees were active at the
county level. We will accept help from
any source. I would imagine the John
Birch people pay their taxes like anyone
else.” 3

“Our main concern is with welfare
andHEW” (Health, Education and Wel-
fare), he said. “We're finding an awful
lot of people who are fed up with the
billions of dollars wasted by these gov-
ernment agencies.”’ .

But Chambers fully endorsed’Presi-
dent Carter’s $130 billion Pentagon
budget. ‘‘We base ourselves on the
people and probably less than 1% of the

people have expressed any concern.

about military spending,’’ he said.

Three of the nine members of the ‘MR

13” committee’s executive board are
high ranking retired Army and Navy of-
ficers. > as
Chambers, reflecting official NTU
policy, warmly endorsed the $4.4 billion
cut in the capital gains tax loophole
which‘benefits only the wealthy. “I dis-
agreed very much with what President
‘Carter said on the capital gains tax re-
duction,” he said. ‘I do think free en-
terprise is an American right that has
enabled this country to be the greatest
and the strongest in the world.

NTU’s strategy is to conceal its bas-

- ically pro-big business policies beneath

a veneer of fake-populism, denouncing
“big government” and ‘‘bureaucracy.
It promises just’ enough tax relief to

~ middle-class homeowners to lure them

: ting a tax plan in which the
ieee ee to banks, real estate
interests, landlords and giant corpora-

tions.

Said Davidson, “While we are con-.

cerned about an unequal distribution of
the tax burden, we think almost all tax-
payers pay too much . . . therefore, in-
dividual taxpayers, rich and poor, small

Howard Jarvis: ripotts exposed

businesses and large corporations all
stand to gain from our efforts.”

“The cutting edge of NTU’s tax plat-
form is a racist attack on disproportion-
ately Black and Latino poor and unem-
ployed. Welfare benefits, food stamps,.
medicare and social security are the
cause of runaway taxes, not the Penta-
gon budget and government subsidies
for Lockheed Aircraft and other corpo-
rations.

Simple arithmetic exposes, the
ultra-right tax platform as a swindle.
They invariably oppose any cut in the

‘Pentagon budgeting and, in fact, de-

mand sharp increases. They oppose all
bills in Congress to close the estimated -
$90 billion in tax loopholes for the corpo-
rations and the wealthy, instead sup-
porting every bill to widen these
loopholes. At the same time they
agitiate for the elimination of the huge
$79 billion federal budget deficit and the
repayment of the staggering war-
inflated $744 billion national debt.
Clearly, with no cuts in Pentagon spend-

ing and no spending and no closing of

loopholes, the entire burden of this
right-wing ‘‘balance the budget’’

goyd dN

Ronald Reagan: paid no federal taxes in 1970

oyoud iN

scheme would fall on the backs of the
working people and the poor. The ultra-
right ‘‘middle-class tax-relief’’ pro-
gram is in fact a tax increase program
coupled with crippling cutbacks in edu-
cation, medicare, Social Security and
other vital government services.

The doubletalk from the right is to be
expected. Ultra-right former California
governor Ronald Reagan invited repor-

‘ters to his palatial ranchhouse the day

after passage of Proposition 13.and

* claimed credit for the measure, boast-

ing that he is the champion of the over-

- taxed middle class. Yet in 1970, Reagan,

at that time state governor with a
$73,000 salary, and a multi-millionaire
with investments in oil and real estate,
admitted that he paid no federal income
taxes in 1970. This recalled former Pres-
ident Nixon, who resorted to a subter-
fuge making his palaces at Key Bis-
cayne and San Clemente “‘tax exempt”
and thus escaping more than $100,000 in
taxes. President Carter, too, used
loopholes to reduce his taxes to virtually
nothing although his Presidential sal-
ary is- $250,000 and his peanut
warehouses have. made him a mil-
lionaire.

In his recent pamphlet, ‘‘The Crisis
of Everyday Living and the Winning
Fightback,”’ Gus Hall, general secre-
tary of the Communist Party USA,
pointed out that the ultra-right is regis-
tering gains because of the “backing it
is receiving from a much larger seg-
ment”’ of big business.

The masses of the people, he said,
have repudiated the ultra-right in poll
after poll, yet the ultras have succeeded
in. seizing the initiative on a number of
emotional issues, because of a ‘“‘leader-
ship vacuum.” Nowhere is this truer
than on the tax front. The people are
ground down by outrageous taxes piled
one on top of another. Yet the labor
movement and other progressive forces
have only mobilized scattered, off and
on movements for genuine tax relief
based on cutting the military budget,

closing the tax loopholes of the rich and
shifting the tax burden from working

people and the poor to big business and
the rich. :

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—November 3, 1978—Page 7