Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/749

Rh main object of a government by the people is the payment of pensions rather than the protection of life and property.

—The aggregate revenues of the Government for the fiscal year 1897-’98 are estimated, on the basis of existing laws, by the Secretary of the Treasury (Report on the State of the Finances, 1896). at $431,327,000; and the estimates of appropriations, exclusive of sinking fund, required for the same period, are $460,916,000; leaving a prospective national deficit of revenue for the next fiscal year of $45,719,000. The total appropriations of the two sessions of the past (fifty-fourth) Congress aggregate $1,043,437,019. Under such circumstances a provision for an annual revenue of more than $500,000,000 is therefore most expedient, and the question at issue of first importance is. How can this sum be raised with the greatest certainty, regularity, and minimum cost to the Government, and with the least inconvenience and friction on the part of the people who will have to provide it? For the Government never has any money—by which alone the expenses of the state can be defrayed—except what the people—citizens or subjects—give or concede to it by voluntary or involuntary action; while the people, as a whole and in turn, never have any to give except what comes to them as a result of their work, or from an exchange of the products of their work. And such being the case, we are confronted with a homely truth, generally overlooked by writers and legislators on taxation, that what the Government really wants of its people, when it calls upon them for taxes, is work, and that the methods of taxation are only methods for collecting and using the products of work. Furthermore, it ought also to be borne in mind that for every dollar the Government at present expends, the average American citizen must work for at least half a day, or furnish a value equivalent for such an amount of work.

Another matter of almost equal importance for consideration in this connection is the desirability of initiating an adequate revenue system for the national Government, the elements of which shall be rendered in a high degree permanent, by exemption from influences contingent on changes in the political administration, and on temporary commercial and industrial conditions of the country. In fact, it would be difficult to name an influence more certain to be conducive to national prosperity than the realization of such an agency.