252 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

A. No, I can't. Mr. Moylan asked me for that meeting to go into
certain matters that I consider to be, for the time being, of a confi-
dential nature, and I would want to discuss our conversation further
with him. before I would make any statements about it.

Q. Have you scheduled another conference with him?
A. No, not at this point.

Q. Governor, if we could return to the tax law for just one minute,
you've expressed in your comments the probabilities of the loopholes
being constitutional. Goldstein has said, and also Mrs. Janet Hoffman
the City's fiscal advisor has said, the surtax is going to bring less money
than expected. Can we discuss the elderly loophole?

A. I don't consider the elderly thing a loophole at all.

Q. The question I want to ask is based on all of this. Though the
law might be constitutional, was it too quickly and unsoundly drawn
up? There wasn't enough time to do much on such an important
matter. Do you think there is any validity to that?

A. No, I don't, because even though the law was drawn fairly
quickly, it had the benefit of several years of thought and research.
The Cooper plan that originally failed in the session before last of
the Legislature embodied considerably the same thinking, and when
this committee went to work it didn't start simply from scratch. I
don't think that stretching this out to another year of enactment
would have cured these so-called loopholes or defects. In regard to the
loopholes, I think this is rather a poor characterization of certain
benefits that accrue to certain people who have certain personal fi-
nancial situations. If a loophole exists for a person who has tax free
bonds, it exists on his Federal taxes and not just on his State taxes,
and if it's a valid putting off of taxable income for him Federally it
doesn't make it a loophole when it occurs in the State law. I'm talking
about tax exempt securities.

Q. Governor, in your statement you say the Comptroller's stifling
your tax program is a political charade. In what sense of a political
charade?

A. We all know the Comptroller's past positions on any kind of tax
enactments. I've never seen him go out and put his shoulder to the
wheel to pass a tax. Most of the statements that he's made have been
directed to a very expedient position that he's against taxation and
for appropriations.