People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1893 — Our Plea. [ARTICLE]

Our Plea.

We have shown how prices may be increased, and the load of debt on the farmers removed. The profits left in his hands by an increased volume of money and reduced freight and passenger rates, may be further increased by equalizing taxation. Farmers and workingmen, while doing all the labor and possessing less than one fourth of the Nation’s wealth, are by unjust arrangements compelled to pay eighty per cent of the taxes. We believe that an equitable arrangement of our system of taxation, would reduce the farmers’ taxes almost one half. This is an injustice that has long called for redress, but both of the old parties are silent upon the question so far as any practical remedy has been proposed. The People’s Party proposes to deal with this question, and deal with it in the following manner. First. We would have a graded income tax, such as we had during, and for some years after the war. Allow us to make this clear to the understanding of all. Say, as by way of illustrating our idea,

if a merchant at the close of tbe year foots up his total outlay, living, rent, clerk hire, insurance, interest and bad debts and finds the sum to be twenty five hundred dollars. Then he calculates his net income .and finds it to be thirty five hundred dollars, leaving him a net income of one thousand dollars. Say then that w r e take two per cent of that, twenty dollars. Observe we don’t touch his plant or productive capital, but a per cent of his income. If he has no income, then he pays no income tax, and if he has the income it is easily paid, for it is a part of his profits. The last year that

we collected an income tax, w r e raised about seventy four millions, if our memory is not at fault. That was over twenty years ago. Our wealth has more than doubled since. We could now raise two hundred and fifty millions easily. In addition to that, we could levy a graded land tax. Exempt the home, two or three hundred acres, the amount deemed necessary for a home, and then lay a tax of say ten cents on the next forty and an increase on each additional forty, so as to render holding land for speculative purposes unprofitable. In this way we could tax out foreign landholders as well as to loosen the grip of resident ones. In this way w r e could raise a large amount of revenue as well as help forward the solution of the question, “what shall we do with the boys?” Revenue raised in this way would make tariff reduction possible, cheapen many articles of manufacture, and leave more profits in the farmers’ pockets. These things accomplished, and we believe them practicable, farming w’ould once more pay, and homes for all would be made ©nee more possible. We have now pointed out the radical measure of the People’s Party and wherein they differ from the other parties. We know they are radical, we know further that no nation has at any one time lived under all of these conditions, but we believe that our civilization has reached that point w’here we not only can, but must of necessity adopt these reforms or lose our liberties. We shall in our next deal with the money question, and consider objections that have or may be raised to our principles. (To bo continued.)