President Asks Congress For Increase in Taxes

President Johnson, in his fourth State of the Union message last night, called for tax increase to last "so long as the unusual expenditures associated with Vietnam continue.

The President urged Congress not to "arrest the pace of progress," but he outlined little new domestic legislation. On Vietnam, he pledge merely to "stand firm." "The question is whether we can carry on when [the dangers] seem obscure and distant," he said.

The proposed tax increase, the one expected point in the President's address, would be in the form of a six per cent surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes. This means simply that all taxpayers (expert for lower-income heads of families and single persons earning less than $1900 per year) would pay an additional six per cent of their present tax assessments.

The President asked for no general expansion of the war on poverty, but he did propose an increase in social security payments averaging 20 per cent, and an acceleration of the Head Start program.

On other domestic questions, the President confined his legislative proposals to ones which would not cut deeply into the national budget. He suggested a "safe streets and crime control act" including strict firearms regulation, a new open housing law, and an end to "electronic bugging".

On international questions other than Vietnam, President Johnson spoke optimistically. "We have avoided," he said, "both the axe and the rhetoric of the Cold War."

The President summed up his foreign policy as one of support for those who "reject the fool's gold of violence."