McGovern Favors Simplified Tax Proposal

GLENN, MCGOVERN, MONDALE, NIXON, REAGAN, STEGEBERG

Posted By: Kelli Wilslef (email)
Date: 2/7/2011 at 12:48:15

McGovern Favors Simplified Tax Proposal
By Robert Melvold
Maquoketa Community Press
December 21, 1983

George McGovern spent 45 minutes at Maquoketa’s Flapjack restaurant Friday afternoon, Dec. 16, discussing presidential campaign issues with about 25 of the local Democratic Party faithful, and most came away favorably impressed.

McGovern, who won a Distinguished Flying Cross as a World War II bomber pilot in the European military operations in Central America, bring the Marines back from Lebanon as soon as a ceasefire is established and cancel the MX missile and B-1 bomber as an unnecessary duplication of destructive power.

In the domestic filed, the South Dakota senator said he would put the government’s major effort into rebuilding the nation’s roads, water and sewer systems, industries, and parks. He would make America’s railroads the best in the world by the year 2000.

He would revive the construction industry and make home ownership possible by providing one-time government-backed mortgages at 10 percent interest or less.

With regard to corporate and personal income taxes, McGovern would simplify what he termed a “loophole-riddled” U.S. Tax Code and make it fairer by enacting concepts contained in the proposed Bradley-Gephardt Fair Tax Act. He said the proposal would enact a more modest progressive income tax, with a ceiling of approximately30 percent, but with no loopholes available for the wealthy or high-income individuals through limited partnerships, depletion allowances and other techniques designed to bring all income within the lower capital gains bracket.

McGovern added that he would allow U.S. industries tax incentives for adding factories and jobs in the country, but would close these benefits to firms that are adding their factories and jobs abroad or are merely buying existing American businesses, with no increase in jobs.

With regards to agriculture, McGovern said he favored the old 90 percent party for production of farm products for domestic needs, with the rest going at world prices. He favored incentives for set-aside for various conservation purposes.

The farm program, according to McGovern, should be planned four years ahead so that it isn’t PIK one year and another program the next year, with the farmers never knowing how to plan. Also, there would be no embargoes.

McGovern said one of his biggest regrets in losing his Senate seat in 1980 was that he now would have been the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee and the chairman with a projected Democrat control of the Senate after the 1984 election. He favored continuing the investment credit tax for farmers buying new machinery of a domestic manufacturer.

McGovern’s only mention of the two front-runners among the Democratic presidential candidates came when he remarked that with Reagan one can expect a 10 percent increase in military spending each year. With John Glenn it would be seven percent, and with Walter Mondale five percent.

McGovern favors a flat 25 percent reduction achieved through dropping of unneeded programs and a drastic reshaping of Pentagon purchasing policies.

Earlier in the day, McGovern has campaigned in the Quad Cities and was scheduled for a stop at Bellevue before an evening appearance in Dubuque.

After carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his ill-fated presidential race against Richard Nixon in 1972, McGovern was returned to South Dakota voters to the Senate. He was first elected to Congress in 1957 and entered the Senate in 1962.

He received a doctorate in history from Northwestern University and returned to his earlier alma mater, Dakotan Wesleyan University, as a history professor before entering his political career. He had his wife, the former Eleanor Stegeberg, are the parents of five children.