National Affairs: Letter

For a President to address a message to a Congressional conference committee is unconventional, if not utterly unprecedented. Precedents mean nothing to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To Pat Harrison and Bob Doughton, chairmen respectively of Senate Finance and House Ways & Means Committees, members of which were starting the ticklish job of compromising between the two tax bills passed by their respective chambers, he dispatched a 1,000-word letter, recommending in effect that the conference adopt the House bill which, unlike the Senate’s, retains at least a portion of the Administration’s pet undistributed profits and capital gains tax. Excerpt: “The repeal of the undistributed profits tax and the reduction of the tax on capital gains to a fraction of the tax on other forms of income strike at the root of fundamental principles of taxation.

“Business will be helped, not hurt, by these suggestions.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT”