TAXES

Everyone desires a reduction of taxes, and there is a great preponderance of sentiment in favor of taxation reform.  When I approved the present tax law, I stated publicly that I did so in spite of certain provisions which I believed unwise and harmful.  One of the most glaring of these was the making public of the amounts assessed against different income-tax payers.  Although that damage has now been done, I believe its continuation to be detrimental To the public welfare and bound to decrease public revenues, so that it ought to be repealed.

Anybody can reduce taxes, but it is not so easy to stand in the gap and resist the passage of increasing appropriation bills which would make tax reduction impossible.  It will be very easy to measure the strength of the attachment to reduced taxation by the power with which increased appropriations are resisted.  If at the close of the present session the Congress has kept within the budget which I propose to present, it will then be possible to have a moderate amount of tax reduction and all the tax reform that the Congress may wish for during the next fiscal year.  The country is now feeling the direct stimulus which came from the passage of the last revenue bill, and under the assurance of a reasonable system of taxation there is every prospect of an era of prosperity of unprecedented proportions.  But it would be idle to expect any such results unless business can continue free from excess profits taxation and be accorded a system of surtaxes at rates which have for their object not the punishment of success or the discouragement of business, but the production of the greatest amount of revenue from large incomes.  I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the Government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward.  Moreover the effect of the present method of this taxation is to increase the cost of interest on productive enterprise and to increase the burden of rent.  It is altogether likely that such reduction would so encourage and stimulate investment that it would firmly establish our country in the economic leadership of the world.

WATERWAYS

Meantime our internal development should go on.  Provision should be made for flood control of such rivers as the Mississippi and the Colorado, and for the opening up of our inland waterways to commerce.  Consideration is due to the project of better navigation from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.  Every effort is being made to promote an agreement with Canada to build the, St. Lawrence waterway.  There are pending before the Congress bills for further development of the Mississippi Basin, for the taking over of the Cape Cod Canal in accordance with a moral obligation which seems to have been incurred during the war, and for the improvement of harbors on both the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts.  While this last should be divested of some of its projects and we must proceed slowly, these bills in general have my approval.  Such works are productive of wealth and in the long run tend to a reduction of the tax burden.