Message from the Chair
| Publication year | 2017 |
| Author | By Betty J. Williams |
By Betty J. Williams
Along the corridors in my office are dozens of framed Saturday Evening Post cardboard covers my father collected in the 1950s. His grandfather owned the town drug store in Calumet, a small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan, from 1900 until his death in 1969. Each Saturday when the Post was delivered, it came with a cardboard replica of the cover for store owners to place in the window as advertisement for the weekly publication. When the time came to clean out the family home a decade ago, I was the fortunate recipient of business machines that date back to the 1920s, an old-fashioned pin-ball machine, and other conversation pieces that adorn our conference rooms. My father also shared many of the Post covers, one of which reminds me that the challenges associated with paying income tax are not new, and the temptation to file a dishonest tax return is longstanding.
The title of the feature story headlining this particular Post of 1956 reads, "Our Tax Laws Makes Us Dishonest" by Cameron Hawley, pulled from a 444-page novel he wrote. The feature photo shows a couple entering a hotel room and as the wife looks joyously out the window at the Eiffel Tower, the husband appears dismayed as he carefully studies the room charges.
I found a review of Hawley's novel in the American Bar Association Journal, December 1956, Volume 42, page 1153. Hawley considers the ethical erosion that begins on a small scale, such as taking a friend to lunch and deducting it as a business expense on a tax return. While the individual may feel a slight twinge of conscience, he justifies his behavior with the assumption that his friend probably takes the same advantage. From there, it is apparently all downhill when a business' annual convention is held in London — Whoopee! Suddenly the family has a tax-deductible trip to Europe, and on it goes. Hawley notes that some of the "biggest men in the country are behind it, men of unquestioned integrity."
About 80 years before Hawley's novel was published, the U.S. Supreme Court described taxation as lawful robbery when it held, "to lay, with one hand, the power of government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it upon favored individuals...is nonetheless a robbery because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation." Savings and Loan Association v. Topeka.1
Like it or not, we are a nation of laws that include our tax laws. In...
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