ustxtxb_obs_1959_08_08_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer EXCLUSIVE! Let those flatter who fear, it is It ot an American art.JEFFERSON `Well, There It Is Solid as ,a Rolling Stone’ Zee 1J Wait Una 7961 We are, at this moment, opposed to a fourth special session. To be sure, . the teachers want Governor Daniel to call it so they can get their pay raise. We are for this raise ; but we note with something appr’baching disgust how quickly the Texas State Teachers’ Assn. junked the rest of the HaleAikin reforms. At a meeting in Dallas, T.S.T.A.’s legislative chairman, Henry Stilwell, said, in explaining why T.S.T.A. is pushing only for the pay raise, “We aren’t shelving any part of the Hale-Aikin recommendations. We are merely taking a ‘realistic approach.” Well, let us all, then, “merely take a realistic approach.” The legislature which passed the 75 percent sales-tax bill will be the same legislature which would have to finance the teachers’ pay raise in the fall. A single-shot special session leaves no time for public opinion to form. The people would not have time to have the salubrious influence on the fourth session which, after seven continuous months of publicity, they were able to have on the third. What, then, would the fourth session be likely to do? In the first place, the general sales taxers mustered, on their most recent test, 64 votesjust twelve members short of a clear majority of the House. They camouflaged their pitch behind the $100 deductible provision, but anyone knows that once the general sales tax principle is validated in Texas law, the business interests will do everything in their power to make it apply from soup to baby buggies. In the second place, the gas lobby’s token gas tax-1.5 percent income Nothing is more vital to the integrity of the liberal movement in the legislature than an end to the demagogic repudiations of the graduated personal income tax on the election stumps. Gov. Daniel started the reflex action when he began condemning “the general sales tax and the personal income tax.” Nothing is more just and fair in taxation than the principle of ability to pay, of which the personal income tax, scaled higher as income rises, is the best embodiment. Every thoughtless condemnation of the income tax strengthens the sales taxers for the day when the one principle, or the other, must prevail in Texas. In this respect we are relieved that Rep. Eckhardt has hauled the sensitive subject onto the stage of the public debate. Lee’ Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. AUGUST 8, 1959 Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Larry Goodwyn, Associate Editor Sarah Payne, Office Manager Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum.. Advertising rates available on request Extra copies 10c each. Quantity crises available on orders. on severance beneficiarywas put forward and passed by the gas lobby’s men for the simple purpose of hauling down the sails of the Gas House Gang. Aside let us say that the pipeline tax is important, nevertheless, because, if constitutional, it opens a tremendously important avenue of new revenue. Aside let us also say that the House majority were very probably correct in believing that they should pass even this token tax now, when the gastax heat was high, rather than do as Gov. Daniel suggested, wait until the fall for a teachers’ pay session and a gas tax drive, when the public pressure would have eased and the sales taxers might have prevailed. But the main point is, the gas lobby’s play did haul down the sails of the Gas House Gang. In a fourth special session, where would the money come from? Gov. Daniel’s boys have been hinting he would have to rely to some extent on the gasoline sales tax. As the Dallas News has said, this tax is “a general selective sales tax”it hits everybody so certainly, it is really a general sales tax on one item. The sales tax gang already have their way in 75 percent of the pres -ent tax billsales taxes on liquor, cigarettes, cars, boats, radios, TVs, and what-all. What reason is there for thinking that they won’t have their way againat least on gasoline, and probably on a general sales tax? Ave do not, we sadly confess, have any confidence in the principles of the leaders of the teachers’ lobby. If they could get their loot, they would accept ; nay, they would solicit, a general sales tax. We are very much for the HaleAikin reforms. Everybody knows they are going to pass, now or in 1961. We need better schools as soon as we can get them. But the tax structure, too, will be with us 100 or 200 more years. We are making decisions on taxes now which will decide a lot about human welfare and happiness in this state for many decades. The people should have a clear shot at the arrogant sales taxers who’ve been trying to run the state into their grassless little corral. One time, in 1960, let us vote on these Carpetbagging senators and representatives. Then, in 1961, we can pass a proper tax and finance the improvements the schools need and the hospitals, and the other state programs for human welfare. Gov. Daniel would serve the people and his program better by carrying the fight to 1961 than by turning over the decision to the general sales taxers under such unpropitious circumstances. 7 EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 1010 Dennis, Mrs. IL D. Randolph. We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. AUSTIN If this was a transitional legislature. the values of the old guard can still be found embedded in the 300-page appropriations bill. This document, which sags like a sack of flour when you pick it up, and which would have been put to its best use had Rep. Richardson thrown it at Sen Parkhouse instead of a humble desk calendar, does not make for engrossing reading. Nobody reads it, in fact, except the people whose salaries and programs it defines, and they would hardly attend more than their section. When I told a few legislators I had read it, they wanted to steal my notes, pick my brain ; “Nobody reads the appropriations bill !” they exclaimed. All I had at hand was modern novels and the newspaper text of Nixon’s speech in Moscow ; under the circumstances, I turned to the appropriations bill. I kept my notes to myself, and now I can reveal \(as the Scripps-Howard papers would have porter present during this reading, and I can report exclusivelythat it’s dull as hell. Of course, I didn’t read all the figures. The appropriations bill in this respect is like reading Norbert Weiner’s books on the human use of human beings \(as distinct from other and hope the prose will tell you what the math meant. The legislators’ prose in this bill, while not deathless, is deadly : one can see through to the stingy minds. The bill is better than the critics expected. Five members of the Dallas delegation voted no because it was “too much money,” and this is reassuring in the same way that a ban in Boston suggests that the proscribed work might be another Ulysses. On the other hand, it could also be Peyton Place, and not to press the point too far, the appropriations bill accomplishes a good deal of the same kind of thing that goes on in Peyton Place. T AKE the appropriation for the Gatesville School for Boys. Looks finefive new dormitories, repairs on the two Negro dormitories \(the Negroes should get some of the new until you get to the gimmick on page II-31. None of the expansion money can be spent until the school has 1,420 boys and unless the average cost per boy stays where it is or drops. As the director of the Texas Youth Council, Dr. James Turman, said when I asked him about this, “If the price of beans goes up, we can’t pay itwe cut down on the beans.” The most niggardly portion of the bill denies the mental hospitals the expansion, the psychiatrists, the new quarters our mentally ill people desperately need. You don’t have to name a single figure to prove this \(though section there r is a “reserve appropriation” which can be called on to feed or clothe patients when a mental hospital runs out of doughwhich some of them are likely to do under this law. Says a rider, “It is not the intent of the 56th legislature that this reserve appropriation be expended for the general improvement of programs provided for in regular appropriations.” If they’re not starving. don’t spend it. The bill should please the Daughters of the Confederacy, since it appropriates $100,000 \(probably tinto Texas’s confederate dead in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and only $21,000 for monuments to veterans of the Texas Revolution. This is certainly a burden on interstate heroism; evidently it was written in because Daughters of the Confederacy get a gleam in their eye, and from then on, you’re throughif you’re running for re-election. By contrast, the money for the state parks is a disgrace to nature. The average park is allocated about $400 for a year’s care, plus a caretaker who gets $2,100, his house and utilities. An exception : $10,500 for Garner Park improvements. But for “Eisenhower State Park,” obviously a superb park, and very intelligently named, the parks appropriation includes $27,000 “for the construction of roads.” The Highway Department’s $783,000,000, you see, is not enough to cover this project. T HERE IS, we concede, a pay raise for the most underpaid of the state workersespecially the hospital attendants. But the state’s antiworker philosophy is best illuminated THE TEXAS OBSERVER