Page:Report of the Tax Commission to Governor Angus Wilton McLean, 1927.pdf/8

 personal property. Professor Albert S. Keister of the North Carolina College for Women was selected to investigate this subject. After finishing this study, Dr. Keister conducted the survey of the tax burden on city real property. In connection with the field work for this investigation, Dr. Keister also collected data presented in the report on highway advertising signs.

The survey of the administration of the general property tax was the outgrowth of a joint conference between the Tax Commission and the County Government Advisory Commission in the early summer of 1928. The plan for the study is the combined work of Professor Erle E. Peacock and Professor P. W. Wager, and Messrs. C. J. Bradley and Edward A. Terry, members of the Institute for Research in Social Science—all of the University of North Carolina, and Mr. W. E. Easterling, assistance executive secretary of the County Government Advisory Commission. Mr. Peacock was in charge of the field survey, and Mr. Wager, with the assistance of Mr. Bradley, wrote the report. The work of this group makes available a comprehensive body of information on the administration of the general property tax and on related subjects.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Professor J. B. Woosley of the University of North Carolina, for his excellent study of the Taxation of Banks, and to Professor C. P. Spruill, Jr., of the same institution, for making the valuable study of the Taxation of Inheritances and Estates.

The Commission is indebted to Dr. Roy G. Blakey, professor of economics, the University of Minnesota, for the study of the State Income Tax. Professor Blakey, who had just spent a year with the Institute of Economics, making a special study of the Federal Income Tax, possessed a splendid equipment for making an analysis of our state income tax.

To Mr. L. R. Gottlieb, formerly with the National Industrial Conference Board, we are indebted for making the study of the Comparative Burdens of Taxation.

To Professor Thomas S. Adams of Yale University we make grateful acknowledgment for most valuable advice and guidance in the critical period of acquiring a perspective and a conception of the scope of our investigation. He brought to us a theoretical knowledge, seasoned with a practical experience, which was of inestimable value in visioning our problem.

The Commission is indebted to Professors Stewart Robertson and Roger Marshall, of the English faculty of North Carolina State College, for valuable assistance in editing and preparing the report for publication, and to Professor Marc C. Leager of the same institution for the preparation of the charts used in the graphical presentation of the various tables. The excellent graphs in the section on Taxation of Agriculture, however, were prepared by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, United States Department of Agriculture.

The Commission was fortunate in its office staff, the non-commissioned officers. It is under special obligation to Mr. H. H. Wooten and to Mr. C. J. Bradley and their assistants for careful and intelligent handling of the clerical and statistical work which represents the bulk of the Report.

Our final acknowledgment must be to Dr. Fred W. Morrison, executive