Archie Parnell | Blogspot: Revisiting the Civilian Conservation Corps Program

Friday, July 26, 2019

Revisiting the Civilian Conservation Corps Program

A retired senior executive of a Fortune 500 company, Archie Parnell is now actively involved in community matters, particularly in his home state of South Carolina. Archie Parnell believes that to fix and upgrade the country’s deteriorating infrastructure (including roads, airports, and schools) we should reevaluate and learn from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program that ran from 1933 to 1942.

Part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative, the CCC was implemented during the Great Depression to help address high unemployment by hiring primarily young single men, aged 18 to 25, to engage in environmental conservation work across the country. They were each paid $30 per month, in addition to board and lodging at a work camp, and worked for a minimum of 6 months. The men had to send home $22 to $25 of their monthly wages to support their families.

At its peak, the CCC had over 500,000 corpsmen working in 2,900 campsites. Approximately 3 million men, or around 5 percent of the US male population, participated in the program during its 9 years of existence. Basic education provided in the camps enabled around 57,000 men to learn how to read and write.

CCC corpsmen resuscitated grazing land, completed erosion control, constructed roads and bridges, and fought forest fires. Under the program, over 3.5 billion trees were planted—more than half of the private and public reforestation accomplished in the country’s history. This helped stop the Dust Bowl that was affecting many states. The program also established over 700 new state parks.

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A tax attorney and public policy commentator on tax issues in the United States and Asia, Archie Parnell has focused his professional life on tax policy matters around the globe. Outside America, Archie Parnell served as the head of Goldman Sachs’ tax department in Asia being promoted to managing director. During this time, he lived in Tokyo for four years and in Hong Kong for 17 years.

Before Goldman, Parnell was a partner of the international law firm Coudert Brothers where he practiced tax law in Hong Kong. Before that, he served in various senior tax positions at Exxon Mobil. Starting off as a tax attorney for the energy company, he ascended to senior positions in Hong Kong and Brussels.

Back home in the United States, Archie Parnell began his career as a tax attorney in the US Department of Justice Tax Division, appointed under the Attorney General’s Program for Honor Law Graduates. Afterward, he served as a senior staff counsel for the Ways and Means Committee of the US House of Representatives in Washington, focusing on preparing reports for the Oversight Subcommittee.

Leveraging his international business acumen, Parnell has served as an adjunct professor, teaching international business structures at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He is now a public policy commentator on US and Asia tax issues. He has written a number of tax articles over the years published in various law school journals and professional publications. These include: Tax Reform in China: the New Foreign Corporate Income Tax Law (3 CCH Journal of Asian Pacific Taxation 4, 1991), Congressional Interference in Agency Enforcement: The IRS Experience (89 Yale Law Journal 1360, 1980), The Internal Revenue Manual: Its Utility and Legal Effect (32 Tax Lawyer 687, 1979), Constitutional Considerations of Federal Control Over the Sovereign Taxing Authority of the States, 28 Cath. U. L. Rev. 227 (1979), The Right to Privacy and the Administration of the Federal Tax Laws (31 Tax Lawyer 113, 1977), and Sale of Contracts: When Capital Gains Treatment is Available to the Seller (43 Journal of Taxation 200, 1975). He also co-authored A Loss of Investor Privileges with Owen Nee in the China Business Review (July-Aug. 1996).

He has spoken to a number of groups on tax issues, most recently in Hong Kong at the International Fiscal Association, on the topic “The History of International Taxation in the United States since the 16th Amendment: Where We Are Now and Implications for the Future.”

Archie was the Chair of the Tax Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong (1992, 1993 and 1998) and Chair of the Capital Markets Tax Committee of Asia (1994, 1995 and 1997). He was a member of the Business and Investment Advisory Committee (“BIAC”) to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (the “OECD”) from 2010 to 2016 and Vice Chair of BIAC’s Tax Committee to the OECD from 2013 to 2016.