CANAL ZONE: Paradise Partly Lost

Because they must live and work in the debilitating tropics, U.S. civil servants in the Panama Canal Zone have long enjoyed certain privileges. Among them: 25% pay differential, income-tax exemption, commissary rights and “recuperative” vacations of two months a year. These features have combined to make life in the isthmian strip a kind of welfare-state Elysium. But last week Elysium looked a little more like the good old U.S.A. Before leaving for its recess, Congress had enacted a law decreeing that the Zone’s Government employees, like federal workers elsewhere, must pay regular income taxes. Unkindest cut of all for the Zonians: the tax was made retroactive to Jan. 1, 1950.