St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1894-02-15
TAX ANY ONE BUT Us,

The st. Paul chamber of commerce
adopts protest against the imposition
of an income tax While that does not
necessarily settle the question whether
the senate will pass the Wilson bill
with the income tax attachment, it does
settle the position which these gentle
men assume before the public, and il
renders somewhat clearer the hitherto
incomprehensible causes which sent
Mr.. kiefer to congress as the repre-
sentative of great C commercial and
manufacturing district.
A chamber composed of business men
who could at one time ask congress to
continue the taxation of the raw ma
terlal of iron and steel, OF which they
were insignificant consumers, and now
can ask it not to impose tax which
would reduce that portion of their an
nual incomes per cent which exceeds
$4,000. are fifty represented in congress
by mathematician who objects to any
reduction of tax on potatoes. and who
views with alarm the destructive effects
on the potato industry if the tax be re-
duced $50 per cent.
and themselves exempted. we see an
instance of that sort of patriot SIN which
Artemus Ward so happily burlesqued
in his avOwal of his willingness to offer
all his wife's relations as sacrifices on
the altar of his country. 1t has another
parallel in that prayer of the devout
deacon who prayed:
God bless me and my wife,
Son John and his wife;
u four, and no more"
Ii may not occur to these gentlemen
OF the chamber, but il is the fact that this
action of theirs and the similar action of
other bodies like theirs is precisely
what gives the income tax its great
popular strength. 1t is not at all, as
some who oppose the tax state, that the
tax is popular only among the i'm
mensely larger number of people who M
it does not affect because it does not
touch them. 1t is because there is in
the minds of these people certainty of
conviction that the weather. of our peo-
pie are expert in evading taxation; that
while eager to share the advantages
of the social organization, eager to
appropriate the lions share of them to
themselves. they are equally willing to
let others less able than themselves
bear the bulk of the cost. They have
seen men OF this class going before the
board Of abatement to get assessments
reduced, and refusing to make oath that
their property, for whose value they
were assessed, was not of that value,
and they have seen the boards obSequi-
ously reduce them. And later, they
have seen some of these same evaders
of burdens imposed by law going before
mayor and demanding from him a
strict enforcement of the law closing
saloons on Sundays.
1t is this, and the feeling that the in
come tax will make this class OF our
citizens bear some of the burdens which
present methods enable them to dodge,
that forms the ground on which rests
the wide and deep popular favor for the
income tax. Like some other matters
in the relations of men, the persons OBJ
Jectlng and complaining of injustice are
but the sufferers Of retIibuJion which
they have themselves invited. The
French revolution was but the reaction
from centuries of injustice, and, hor-
ribly brutal as it was, it is not improb-
able that the sum of the brutalitieS on
each side equaled each other. and the
law that action and reaction are equal
held Its own again.