Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1891 — Who Pays the Tariff? [ARTICLE]

Who Pays the Tariff?

Some time ago a number of merchants in New York, importing worsted goods to the amount of many millions of dollars annually, complained to the Treasury Department of an Appraiser of Customs who had arbitrarily raised the valuation of their imports. While the case has just been decided in favor of the importers, we have to do only with the facts bearing on the operation of the tariff. The wholesale price of the goods in question was 56 cents a yard in England—the price paid by buyers from every market, as the manufacturers testify. Under the former tariff the duty on their goods was IS cents a yard and 35 per cent, ad valorem. The McKinley tariff raised the duty to 44 cents a yard ana 50 per cent, ad valorem—or a duty of 72 cents a yard on a material costing 56 cents a yard at the point of production. Adding duties, charges and commissions of importers, the wholesale price in New York would be $1.50 a yard, and little, if anything, less than $2 a yard at retail to the American consumer. It is manifest that the manufacturer cannot pay these enormous duties; nor does he pay any share of them, since he sells his goods at the same price to the importers in the United States and elsewhere without reference to foreign tariffs. The duties, then, to the last cent, come out of the pockets of Amercian consumers. When the McKinley tariff was in committee the home manufacturers of worsteds alleged that they could not compete with importers at the prices then existing. To secure the present advance in duties on worsteds they consented to an increase of 20 per cent, in the duty upon combing wool. Can they afford now to sell their products at the former range of prices of which they complained, and pay an increased tax upon their imported raw materials? The effect of the McKinley tariff has not only been to raise the cost of imports by the amount of the increased duty, but to raise to nearly if not quite the same level the cost of the rival domestic products to American consumers. This is what the McKinley tariff was enacted for; and it has not failed in its purposa