Beardsley Ruml (5 November 1894 – 19 April 1960) was an American statistician, economist, philanthropist, planner, businessman and man of affairs in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

From 1922 to 1929, he directed the fellowship program of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, focusing on support for quantitative social and behavioral science.

He also served as a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank (1937–1947), and was its chairman from 1941 until 1946;[2] he was active at the Bretton Woods Conference (1944), which established the international monetary system.

[citation needed] In the summer of 1942, Ruml proposed that the U.S. Treasury start collecting income taxes through a withholding, pay-as-you-go, system.

The real purposes of taxes, he asserted, were: to "stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar," to "express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income," "in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups" and to "isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security."