The Congress: An Idea on the March

There they came, streaming into Washington filled with plans and programs and hopes and fears and endless ambitions. They were the members of the 88th Congress, preparing to convene this week.

When all are gathered, they will number 535. Asked to name the most important, any New Frontiersman would unhesitatingly cite a name that most Americans know only vaguely: Wilbur Daigh Mills, 53, a quiet, cautious Congressman from a backwoods town in Arkansas.

Mills is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. And as such, he may largely determine the fate of President Kennedy's most important bill of 1963: the tax-revision program that the Administration is presently preparing to send to Congress.

That program already bears the impress of Mills's influence: Kennedy has drastically revised his proposals to accommodate objections that Mills raised. During the recent shaping of the bill, Administration officials frequently consulted with Mills by telephone. At times it seemed as if the two most important seats of power in the U.S. were the temporary White House in a Palm Beach mansion and Congressman Mills's office in the basement of the post office in Searcy, Ark., just a hoot and a holler from his home town of Kensett.

Search for Culprits. Victor Hugo supposedly said: "Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose hour has come." The tax bill goes to Congress with that kind of impetus behind it—the power of an idea on the move. During 1961 there emerged in the U.S. a history-making consensus that the time has come to do something about taxes. There are broad, often passionate, differences about what should be done, and how and when. But on the central point that the U.S. tax system is excessively burdensome and unnecessarily complicated, agreement cuts across old dividing lines, embraces Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, businessmen and scholars, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Association of Manufacturers.

Discontent with taxes is nothing new in history. Over the centuries, it has been an explosive force. Both the American and French revolutions were brought on in part by taxpayer disaffection. But today's tax-revision tide is essentially different from the elemental discontent shared by all burdened taxpayers throughout history. What is astir in the U.S. is a sophisticated discontent—the nation has scrutinized itself and found a deep but correctable flaw.

The scrutiny grew out of concern about the sluggishness of the U.S. economy. The economy's recovery from the 1957-58 recession was distinctly lacking in zing. Unemployment remained worrisomely high, and in Election Year 1960 signs of a new recession were gathering. "Growth" became a central issue in the campaign. Again in 1961-62, the recovery was faint and hesitant.

Seeking the causes, more and more economists began pointing at the U.S.'s tax structure. Congressman Mills had been doing that for years. "We must re-examine our tax structure and the concepts on which it is based," he said in a speech in 1958. To speed up growth, he went on, the nation would have to encourage investment, and to do that it would have to "review the rates of progression in our income tax brackets."