People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1895 — SURPLUS AND DEFICIT [ARTICLE]

SURPLUS AND DEFICIT

TOM WATSON SCORES CLEVELANDISM. W»U Street Is I«utis| on the Deficit M It Did on the Surplus —Grover's Nefarious Schemes Brought to Liffht. During the first administration of tttariah Halpin’s man Cleveland, this country, was told in ponderous sentences all about the awful havoc that •he surplus was making with the prosperity of the people. The Surplus became a nightmare, a soar e-crow, an old Man of the Sea; And we got to the point where we | Could hardly go to bed in confidence . and comfort unless we first looked under the bed to see that the surplus Was not laying in wait to murder us in our slumbers. Cleveland had kept talking about * Surplus, Surplus, Surplus, ufrt.il lots of us began to have the same feeling toward it that a negro used to have toward the Ku Klux Klan. So seriously disturbed were we in our minds about the dangers and the 4»adfalls, the snares and the man■paps, the deceits and the betrayals, Which Mr. Cleveland assured us forked in the inner caverns of the •urplus, that we implored him to save tte —to save us by any merthods whatever from the armed enemies of our Rational welfare which crouched concealed within the insides of this modern Trojan Horse of a Surplus. After our scare was over, and the Surplus had been met and conquered *y the hero of Buzzard's Roost, v. r e pro v; calm raough to listen to a cold Recital of the facts, and to realize the 4x«tct nature of the perils we had escaped. The Surplus, it seemed, was a pile -of money which had been collected from the tax-payers, over and above the needs of the Government, and "touch the office-holders absolutely • oould not spend. This was 3/wful indeed. It is . divbiult to exaggerate the

mental agon es of two or three hundred thour. ind office-holders who have to stead in sight of a big pile of public money day after day, week after week, month after month, and not have the power to lay their feverish fingers unon it. ' It is the unwritten law of this blessed Republic that the Government must spend at least as much as the taxpayers can be made to pay. By an oversight, Congress had failed to increase the expenses in proportion to the increase of the Tariff and Internal Revenue Taxes, and hence, to the disgust and dismay of Cleveland and his tribe, the taxes far exceeded the expenses Congress had authorized. No wonder the disturbance in official circles was so great. No wonder Mr. Cleveland made the continent tremble as he heavily held forth on the dangers of a Surplus. What was to be done with the money? Andrew Jackson had, under similar circumstances, divided the Surplus among the states —'thus sending the money the Government didn’t need back to the people to whom it belonged. Jackson, however, and his kind of Democracy being deader than Pharoah, Mr. Cleveland never once thought of getting that Surplus money back into the pockets of the people to whom it belonged. As is well known, he made a gift of about sixty million ddllars of it to the Wall Street bondholders, by way of premiums, for the privilege of paying Government debts which were not due. Another sixty million dollars of it was given to the national bankers, free of interest, to lend out at usury to the poor devils to whom it belonged. These little palliatives eased the pains of the Surplus very considerably, and held its fever under control until Congress met again. As soon as that able body of Sunday-smashers and

law-despisers met, they promptly ran the expenditures up to the full limit of the taxes, and thus we have never Buffered since from the painful colic of having too mucih money for our digestion to cope with. Mr. Cleveland’s brilliant statesmanship never shdwed to better advantage than when he struggled with the dangers of tht Surplus and came forth from the contest covered with victory. He got rid of the Surplus by giving it away. The Government had squeezed it out of the tax-payers, and the President made a gift of it to the Privileged Class which pays no tax at all. To rob Peter to pay Paul is commonplace rascality; but to rob Peter, the tax-payer, to make a gift to Paul, the bondholder, is an average sample of latter-day statesmanship. In pushing expenditures upwards to head off another possible Surplus. Congress rather over-did the thing. The tax-payers began to be exhausted, and the stream of national revenue did not run so bounteously as of yore. The Bill'ion-dollar Congress of the Republicans scraped the bottom of . Uncle Sam’s cash-box, and a Deficit began to be a small cloud upon the horizon —no larger yet than a man s hand. Ohas. Foster prepared Republican plates for the issue of Republican bonds in order to get more money. The in-corning Democrats indignantly stopped the plan, and sternly rebuked the planners. The Democratic Congress even used lippy language to Charles Foster about daring continue 4% per cent bonds at 2 per cent. I recollect that Jad"2

Turner, foe able Democratic statesman of South Georg 5 1 who has so nimbly boxed the -ratire compass on the financial quest in. v ;3 seriously displeased with said Foster for venturing to renew national d; >ts which Democrats were ready to pay. Then came the BillKm-doli&r Crisp Congress No. 1. And then the Billion-dollar Crisp Congress No. 2. But before the Democrats had been on deck long enough to get the pieoounter questions adjusted, the Deficit was upon us—a gigantic, remorseless, and devouring Deficit. Wall Street is feasting upon the Deficit just as it did upon the Surplus. In Cleveland’s first administration they fattened upon premiums and free deposits. In his second, they fattened on nontaxed bonds, and ten million dollar private deals. Foster’s plates are doing heroic duty grinding out 5 per cent bonds —and Judge Turner saying nothing. The dangers of a Surplus brought pie to the bondholders. The perils of a Deficit bring pie to the bondholders. They plunder us when we pay too much, and they despoil us when we pay too little. A Surplus hurts, and a Deficit destroys.—People’s Party Paper.