Business: A Monument to Expediency

The Excess Profits Tax

Not since Prohibition has there been a U.S. law so widely condemned as the excess profits tax, which will die on June 30 unless Congress, heeding the President's appeal last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), extends it. Nobody hates the tax more than Treasury Secretary George Humphrey. "Its worst enemy can very well voice our feelings about it," says he. "It's a bad tax." But he and President Eisenhower feel that the U.S. needs the $800 million that an extra six months of excess profits taxes would yield. Thus, Congress itself must decide whether expediency shall outweigh an admitted...