With a loss, according to its own figures, over 400 per cent as great on newspapers as on magazines, the department goes to the magazines, of scarcely one-third the weight of newspapers, and with not one-twentieth the financial ability to pay such a new tax, to meet the whole burden of its futile and confiscatory attempt to reduce the deficit.
Furthermore, the advertising in magazines, which the department proposes to tax out of existence, is the very national mail-order advertising that produces the profitable revenue, as against the local announcements in the newspapers of the class of page department-store advertisements, etc., which do not call for answers through the mails under first-class postage (see Exhibit F).
And, still further, the modern newspaper of large circulation is more of a magazine, as distinguished from a paper chiefly devoted to disseminating news and intelligence and discussion of public affairs, than the modern magazine. Compare the “magazine sections” of the large newspapers (and most of the balance of their Sunday issues), with publications like the Review of Reviews, World’s Work, Current Literature, Literary Digest, Collier’s Weekly, or even with Everybody’s, the American, the Cosmopolitan and McClure’s, to see the obvious truth of this statement.
I have marked the fourth from last paragraph of the publishers’ “Exhibit C” to be set in italics. I did so for fear the hurried reader might gather a wrong impression from its wording. The publishers do not mean to say that it costs the government 7.75 cents a pound to carry and handle newspapers, nor 5.4 cents a pound to carry and handle magazines. It is a _known fact_ that both the newspapers and the magazines _can be carried and handled_ by the government at a profit at $20.00 a ton--at the cent-a-pound rate. Mr. Hitchcock asserted in the official brochure to which the publishers are here making reply, I take it, that second-class mail hauling and handling costs 9.23 cents a pound. In this “Exhibit C,” the publishers are proving that, _even if his absurd claim as to cost were true_, his method of apportioning that cost between newspapers and other periodicals is grossly unfair, as well as ridiculously wrong mathematically.