CO-OP ENEMIES PLAY WITH TNT
The Cooperative Movement Co-op Enemies Play With TNT EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article is taken from the Cooperative Consumer, organ of the Consumers Cooperative Association, North Kansas City,...
...The campaign of CCG is certain to prove a boomerang...
...they are tax-gatherers...
...Hence it is John Q. Public who pays the tax load...
...But the fellow who finally pays them all is the consumer...
...Pamphlets and broadsides will be printed in an effort to prejudice people generally into believing that federal income tax exemption for agricultural cooperatives is a form of subsidy which gives them an advantage over private profit business...
...That would precipitate a price-cutting orgy which would leave many little businessmen prostrate and the cooperatives without patronage refunds to be taxed unfairly...
...Funds in the hands of a cooperative at the end of the year, after all costs of doing business have been paid, represent overcharges which, in the hands of individual enterprisers, would be called profit...
...Altogether it collects taxes ' of various kinds amounting to $1,500,000 a year...
...They overlook the fact, however, that since cooperatives are non-profit organizations anyway, they can cut the going price to the bone, charging for merchandise barely enough to cover all costs of doing business...
...On the same basis its 749 member associations collect taxes of various kinds amounting to nearly $4,000,000 a year...
...The extent to which industry generally is nursing at the federal breast can be understood generally by a glance at the war contracts not to mention the "loans" businessmen have from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—the agency set up a good many years ago, in only 11 days, to-socialize some of the business losses of "rugged individualists" who were on the verge of becoming ragged individualists...
...Federal income tax exemptions for agricultural"'' purchasing cooperatives is not federal subsidy in any sense of the word...
...The going price they charge for goods and services is high enough, generally speaking, to pay all taxes and provide something over in addition...
...Is that what businessmen want...
...The Cooperative Movement Co-op Enemies Play With TNT EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article is taken from the Cooperative Consumer, organ of the Consumers Cooperative Association, North Kansas City, Mo...
...Consumers Cooperative Association does not pay...
...However, it pays many other taxes...
...In brief, CCG intends to take away federal income tax exemption from agricultural cooperatives by national legislation...
...From the cooperatives' viewpoint it presents one of the best reasoned arguments we have seen against the current drive of private business groups to deprive cooperatives of their traditional exemption from federal income taxes...
...Even the publishers who are inveighing heavily against federal income tax exemption for cooperatives are themselves beneficiaries of an enormous federal subsidy known as second-class mailing privileges—the right to mail their newspapers and magazines at far below what it costs Uncle Sam to deliver them...
...To ask a cooperative to pay income tax on such funds would be as fair as to ask a businessman without income to pay an income tax...
...There is scarcely an industry which does not have its feet in the public trough in varying degrees...
...No one should be fooled into believing that anyone but the people themselves pay the costs of government...
...federal income taxes on patronage refunds...
...Since consumers organized to serve themselves cannot make profit out of themselves, they treat overcharges for what they are and return them to those who were overcharged in the first instance...
...Certain To Prove A Boomerang These private enterprisers who would tax cooperatives unfairly are playing with dynamite...
...They fail to recognize the fact that cooperatives generally are not price-cutters but charge going prices...
...The campaign will be well-financed...
...It will merely crystallize sentiment for cooperatives as all such campaigns in times past have done...
...BUSINESSMEN are not taxpayers...
...The CCG members seem to be surprisingly unmindful of the fact that they could secure any advantages which they think the co-ops have merely by organizing their own businesses along cooperative lines...
...Representing retailers of coal, lumber, grain, feed and other commodities, its announced purpose is to "equalize tax laws between co-ops and private industry...
...Girding For A Fight Despite all this, the Central Coordinating Group, Inc., (CCG), with headquarters in Chicago, is girding itself for a nationwide fight on cooperatives...
...Members of CCG are merely "kidding"'themselves and the public when they insist that they are taxpayers rather than tax-gatherers...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 50
