The Congress: Off Its Haunches

At long, long last, the 88th Congress seemed to be getting off its haunches. The House Ways and Means Committee was ready to present its anxiously awaited version of a tax revision bill that could certainly help shape the course of the U.S. economy for quite a while to come. The bill, barring some last-minute hitch, will offer a cut in two steps over a two-year period beginning next Jan. 1 of about $10 billion a year in personal and corporate taxes. It would lower the rate range for individuals from the present 20% -91% to 15% -70% and cut corporate taxes from 52% to 48%.

Last week the Congress also:

> Approved, by an 84-0 vote in the Senate, a $1.2 billion annual pay raise for members of the U.S. armed services. A key feature of the bill is that the highest increases — of up to 25.7%—go to younger officers, Army majors, captains and first lieutenants, and their naval equivalents. These men are reaching the decision point of their careers—to stay or not to stay in the service. Thus, while a service chief of staff would get a $95-per-month raise (to a total of $26,628 a year), an Army major would be boosted by $120-per-month to an annual salary of $10,596. As for the poor benighted private, he will keep right on getting something less than $90 per month.

> Passed, by a 377-21 vote in the House, an expanded vocational education bill aimed at giving job training to some 21 million youths who will flood the labor market without college degrees during the rest of the 1960s. The measure, which next goes to the Senate, would increase the Federal Government’s contributions to states from $57 million a year now to $237 million by 1967. The lopsided House vote came only after a party-line battle over Republican efforts to attach an amendment barring grants to segregated vocational training schools or programs. Democrats insisted that this was just a ruse, and two Democratic Negroes voted against the amendment. This led California’s Republican Representative Charles Guber to taunt, after the amendment was defeated, “My count shows that 142 Republicans voted against discrimination and 185 Democrats voted for discrimination.”

> Received,from a House committee studying U.S. foreign aid, a report which, while approving a $4 billion authorization bill, sharply questioned the wisdom of continuing economic and military aid to such politically dubious nations as Indonesia. Said the report: “The committee does not wish to write off Indonesia as hopeless, but there is little to indicate that its government is less receptive to the blandishments of the Communist bloc or more ready to cooperate with the U.S.”