national income, while labor of every class, including the labor of capitalists, receives three-fifths. The Labor Bureau statistics show that 6,000 families occupy dwellings worth $156,000,000; 60,000 families dwellings worth but $90,000,000. Leroy-Beaulieu estimates 7 per cent. of the families have one-half the aggregate of the income of the nation. This is about the aver age of the European cities. PRESIDENT: What have you to show the distribution of income? (SENATOR presents paper; PRESIDENT reads.) INCOME OF THE UNITED STATES (PRIOR TO TAXATION). PRESIDENT: America is a frail cockle on the black bot tomless deluges. SENATOR: Stick to the record, Mr. President. PRESIDENT: Statistics are broiling horrors. Can we not have a wave of peaceful music? SENATOR: Electioneerings, screechings, and jibberings are in order until November, but through the dark-turning hideous ways of statistics we move toward new heights and developments. PRESIDENT: If it rained ingots, the growth of wealth would avail nothing under our own system of indirect taxation. SENATOR: These are great black sheets of Taxation fished up out of the nation's swine trough. PRESIDENT: Taxation, gloomy, mournful, musing, silent, looking back on the unalterable and forward to the inevitable and inexorable, is rushing America into the Niagara rapids. What is the summary ? SENATOR: About 125,000 families receive five-sixths of the income. Less than one-half of the income of the working classes is received by 6,500,000—that is, 1 per cent. receive one-fourth of the national income, while 50 per cent. receive hardly one-fifth. One-eighth of the families receive more than half the aggregate income; the wealthiest 1 per cent. receive a larger income than the poorest 50 per cent. The small class of wealth from property receives as large an income as half of the people receive from property and labor. PRESIDENT: What does the History of Wages show in the distribution of wealth? SENATOR: Comparative wages were― Between 1860 and 1873 wages in Gold advanced 531 per cent., but the gain has been reduced 43 per cent. although the country continued to advance in property. PRESIDENT: Were the incomes which you report prior or subsequent to taxation? SENATOR: Prior. PRESIDENT: Do you regard a nationalized income tax essentially a property tax? SENATOR: Assuredly. PRESIDENT: Have you an income table? PRESIDENT: Is not each class taxed in proportion to its property? Is not that just? SENATOR: A great writer has said public conceptions of justice do not rest upon political philosophers. Our local taxes are direct; our national taxes wholly indirect. The public does not see how it is taxed. The same great author says the whole subject is thus taken out of the control of the public conscience and placed under the control of powerful private interests. Pitt and the Parliament refused Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison's treaty for unrestricted commercial reciprocity treaty. Our Constitution adopted the "direct taxes." The Supreme Court, reversing its unanimous earlier decisions, declares that the clause in the Constitution relating to direct taxation meant to the constitutional convention what such a clause would mean to-day. England and Germany are not so ungenerous to the poorer classes. Their income tax distributes the burden of taxation among the various classes. Eighty million dollars is the yearly amount of England's income tax. Germany's progressive inheritance tax is $70,000,000; Prussia's, $29,000,000; France's, $40,000,000. Even Africa and Spain levy such a tax. But our Supreme Court has overturned the Democratic Income Tax Bill. Our revenues aggregate four hundred millions. All but twenty is raised by customs and internal revenue; three-quarters from taxes on liquors, tobacco, sugar, and clothing. It is estimated that the wealthy classes pay onetenth, the well-to-do one-quarter, and the poor two-thirds. But when we consider the revenue actually received by the Government, wealth pays less than one-tenth of the indirect tax, the middle class less than one-quarter, and the poor more than two-thirds. Kindly examine this table, Mr. President (presenting the paper). $5,000 and over. $3,110,000,000 $35,500,000,000 $35,000,000 85,000,000 The Republican legislation has followed not so great a scholar as Professor Seligman, but Tierre, who declared that indirect taxation was the system of most advanced nations, while direct taxation belonged to barbarous people. PRESIDENT: How does the Republican system of local taxation strike you? SENATOR: It has very much the complexion of fraud. Its burdens rest twice as heavily upon the poor as upon the rich. The aggregate local and national tax is one-tenth of the income of every class. The wealthy are taxed less than 1 per cent., while the masses are taxed more than 4 per cent. This is the grave iniquity decreed by law which creates the aristocracy and democracy. The democracy hold barely one-eighth of the national wealth, and one family of the aristocracy out of every one hundred owns as much as the remainder. Put in another shape, one-tenth has the same aggregate income as the nine-tenths; 1 per cent., the aristocracy, has as much as 50 per cent. of the democracy. PRESIDENT: Can we not meet the Nebraskan by showing the trend of European civilization? SENATOR: No, sir. That is from a proportional to a progressive income tax, and the Democrats will reply, our Supreme Court reversed all its earlier and unanimous decisions to defeat the Democratic Income Tax which equally distributed the public burden. The Nebraskan will answer the public welfare is the supreme law; the wealth of the nation should be synonymous with the national well-being. PRESIDENT: Is there any compilation which shows the minimum debt of the United States? SENATOR: Here (presenting paper) is— THE MINIMUM DEBT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1890. [Estimate of Mr. George K. Holmes, the head of the Bureau of MortgagesPolitical Science Quarterly, 1893 :] Telegraph, public water, gas, electric lighting, and power com panies (estimated)... 200,000,000 Other quasi-public corporations (to make round total).. 11,661,962 Other banks (loans and overdrafts, not including real-estate mortgages)......... 1,172,918,415 Other private debts (to make round total).... 1,191,023,265 Total debt of other private corporations and individuals.... $11,000,000,000 ...... 16,000,000,000 |