THE CONGRESS: Mills & Millions

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A Harvard-trained Arkansas lawyer, Congressman Wilbur Daigh Mills, 49, spent months with his expert 15-man staff studying the prosperous U.S. life insurance industry. His work paid off last week when the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, which he chairs, unanimously reported out a bill that will—if passed by Congress—immediately add $540 million to the U.S. tax take from the 1958 insurance business, at least $600 million to revenues from 1959 and later years. General aim: to extend into the complex insurance business the corporate income taxes imposed on other industries.

The insurance tax is only the beginning of grueling years of work Mills has laid out for Ways & Means. A realist who expects little cut in federal budgets until the Communists turn peaceful, he is also a conservative equally opposed to either deficit financing or higher basic tax rates on incomes. His tough-minded alternative: "Broaden the tax base." His method, as shown last week: conscientiously plug loopholes and extend the standard tax rate to now-favored industries. Top priority for his section-by-section revision of the tax code: farm cooperatives' exemptions, estate and trust provisions, depletion allowances for oil and minerals.

Wilbur Mills knows that he is toiling at a painfully exacting, thankless job. Yet his counting of mills, pennies and millions offers the best chance to meet U.S. defense needs without initiative-killing tax hikes or printed-money inflation.