Part 7 (1/2)
A. William Loos, Executive Director of the Church Peace Union, is a member of the Executive Committee of the FPA-WAC. Mr. Loos attended the CFR meeting with high communist party officials in the Soviet Union in May, 1961.
Henry Siegbert, formerly a partner in the investment banking firm of Adolph Lewisohn & Sons, is a member of the Executive Committee of the FPA-WAC, and also a member of the CFR.
Chapter 4
COMMITTEE FOR ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
On June 20, 1961, _The San Francisco Examiner_ published a United Press International news story with a June 19, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C. date line, under the headline ”J.F.K. Backs Tax Cut Plan.”
Here are portions of the article:
”President Kennedy today urged Congress and the people to give a close study to a monetary reform proposal which would empower him to cut income taxes in recession periods.
”He issued the statement after receiving a bulky report from the Commission of [sic] Money and Credit....
”The 27-member commission was set up in 1957 by the Committee for Economic Development (CED). Its three-year study was financed by $1.3 million in grants from the CED and the Ford and Merrill Foundation.
”One of the key recommendations was to give the President limited power to cut the 20 percent tax rate on the first $2000 of personal income, if needed to help the economy....
”The report also recommended extensive changes in the Federal Reserve System, set up in 1913 as the core of the Nation's banking system....”
This _San Francisco Examiner_ article is a cla.s.sic example of propaganda disguised as straight news reporting.
A story about the President supporting a plan for reducing taxes could not fail to command sympathetic attention. But the truth is that the tax reform proposals of the Commission on Money and Credit would give the President as much power and leeway to _raise_ taxes as to lower them.
In its 282-page report, the Commission made 87 separate proposals. One would permit the President (on his own initiative) to reduce the basic income-tax rate (the one that applies to practically every person who has any income at all) from 20% to 15%. It would also permit the President to raise the basic rate from 20% to 25%.
The idea of giving the President such power is as alien to American political principles as communism itself is. The proposed ”machinery”
for granting such Presidential power would violate every basic principle of our const.i.tutional system. Under the Commission's proposal, the President would announce that he was going to increase or decrease taxes. If, within sixty days, Congress did not veto the plan, it would become law, effective for six months, at which time it would have to be renewed by the same procedure. That is very similar to the Soviet way.
It could not be more foreign to the American way if it had been lifted from the Soviet const.i.tution.
Other proposals in the report of the Commission on Money and Credit, filed on June 18, 1961, after a three-year study:
1. The Federal Reserve Act would be amended to give the President control over the Federal Reserve System--which, as set up in 1913, is supposed to be free of any kind of political control, from the White House or elsewhere.
2. The Commission recommends elimination of the legal requirement that the Federal Reserve System maintain a gold reserve as backing for American currency. A bill was introduced in Congress (May 9, 1961, by U. S. Congressman Abraham Multer, New York Democrat) to implement this Commission recommendation. The bill would take away from American citizens twelve billion dollars in gold which supports their own currency, and enable government to pour this gold out to foreigners, as long as it lasts, leaving Americans with a worthless currency, and at the mercy of foreign governments and bankers (see the _Dan Smoot Report_, ”Gold and Treachery,” May 22, 1961).
3. The banking laws of individual states would be ignored or invalidated: banking laws of 33 states prohibit mutual savings banks; the Commission on Money and Credit wants a federal law to permit such banks in all states.
4. The Commission would circ.u.mvent, if not eliminate, state laws governing the insurance industry: the Commission proposes a federal law which would permit insurance companies to obtain federal charters and claim federal, rather than state, regulation.
5. The Commission would subject all private pension funds to federal supervision.
6. The Commission would abolish congressional limitations on the size of the national debt--so that the debt could go as high as the President pleased, without any interference from Congress.