State of the Union AddressesTaft, William H. (William Howard)
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State of the Union Addresses
Taft, William H. (William Howard)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
I believe them to be necessary in order to offer a proper inducement to
thrift and saving to a great many people of small means who do not now have
banking facilities, and to whom such a system would offer an opportunity
for the accumulation of capital. They will furnish a satisfactory
substitute, based on sound principle and actual successful trial in nearly
all the countries of the world, for the system of government guaranty of
deposits now being adopted in several western States, which with deference
to those who advocate it seems to me to have in it the seeds of
demoralization to conservative banking and certain financial disaster. The
question of how the money deposited in postal savings banks shall be
invested is not free from difficulty, but I believe that a satisfactory
provision for this purpose was inserted as an amendment to the bill
considered by the Senate at its last session. It has been proposed to delay
the consideration of legislation establishing a postal savings bank until
after the report of the Monetary Commission. This report is likely to be
delayed, and properly so, cause of the necessity for careful deliberation
and close investigation. I do not see why the one should be tied up with
the other. It is understood that the Monetary Commission have looked into
the systems of banking which now prevail abroad, and have found that by a
control there exercised in respect to reserves and the rates of exchange by
some central authority panics are avoided. It is not apparent that a system
of postal savings banks would in any way interfere with a change to such a
system here. Certainly in most of the countries of Europe where control is
thus exercised by a central authority, postal savings banks exist and are
not thought to be inconsistent with a proper financial and banking system.
SHIP SUBSIDY.
Following the course of my distinguished predecessor, I earnestly recommend
to Congress the consideration and passage of a ship subsidy bill, looking
to the establishment of lines between our Atlantic seaboard and the eastern
coast of South America, as well as lines from the west coast of the United
States to South America. China, Japan, and the Philippines. The profits on
foreign mails are perhaps a sufficient measure of the expenditures which
might first be tentatively applied to this method of inducing American
capital to undertake the establishment of American lines of steamships in
those directions in which we now feel it most important that we should have
means of transportation controlled in the interest of the expansion of our
trade. A bill of this character has once passed the House and more than
once passed the Senate, and I hope that at this session a bill framed on
the same lines and with the same purposes may become a law.
INTERIOR DEPARTMENT. NEW MEXICO AND ARIZONA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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