TRUSTS AND TAXES

Wednesday's newspapers found copy a-plenty in the motor world, where chance brought it about that at the same time as the abolition of a nuisance of ten years standing, the greatest consolidation in the history of motors was completed. The latter is doubtless of more ultimate importance than is the small cut in automobile prices made possible by the removal of the war tax. The advantages of merging in business have been put to a long enough test so that now there is no general cry of a populace fearing control by the trusts whenever such an important transaction occurs: the Big Stick was buried in the distant past, and the present sees no necessity for resurrecting it. Where three or tour concerns are in essential control of an industry, the dangers of monopoly are absent, and still the benefit to be had from unified management and production exists.

For the moment, however, the reduction of prices, or rather, the act making it possible, is salient in the public mind. A treasury which is able to slice two hundred million dollars from federal taxes hardly needs how the income derived from the automobile war tax which belongs anyway to that strange series growths orginating in the feverish days of 1917 along with wheatless days, government ownership, and Thritt Stamps Too small to be of genuine importance in the Treasury, yet large enough to be an annoyance to purchasers of everything massed in the category of luxuries by the wartime administrators, war taxes have been allowed to exist for a decade, mainly through the failure of Congress to remove an evil it knew was unnecessary. A start has at last been made, however, and one of the most obvious examples of illegitimate taxation is no longer. The small but even more annoying nuisance taxes on such "luxuries" as theater tickets are still present, but they too should soon follow the automobile war tax to the limbo of worn out war measures.