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
Therefore, to carry out so far as lay within my power the purposes of this
bill for a permanent Tariff Board, I appointed in March, 1911, a board of
five, adding two members of such party affiliation as would have fulfilled
the statutory requirement, and directed them to make a report to me on
Schedule K of the tariff act in December of this year.
In my message of August 17, 1911, accompanying the veto of the wool bill, I
said that, in my judgment, Schedule K should be revised and the rates
reduced. My veto was based on the ground that, since the Tariff Board would
make, in December, a detailed report on wool and wool manufactures, with
special reference to the relation of the existing rates of duties to
relative costs here and abroad, public policy and a fair regard to the
interests of the producers and the manufacturers on the one hand and of the
consumers on the other demanded that legislation should not be hastily
enacted in the absence of such information; that I was not myself possessed
at that time of adequate knowledge of the facts to determine whether or not
the proposed act was in accord with my pledge to support a fair and
reasonable protective policy; that such legislation might prove only
temporary and inflict upon a great industry the evils of continued
uncertainty.
I now herewith submit a report of the Tariff Board on Schedule K. The board
is unanimous in its findings. On the basis of these findings I now
recommend that the Congress proceed to a consideration of this schedule
with a view to its revision and a general reduction of its rates.
The report shows that the present method of assessing the duty on raw
Wool--this is, by a specific rate on the grease pound (i. e., unscoured)
--operates to exclude wools of high shrinkage in scouring but fine quality
from the American market and thereby lessens the range of wools available
to the domestic manufacturer; that the duty on scoured wool Of 33 cents per
pound is prohibitory and operates to exclude the importation of clean,
low-priced foreign wools of inferior grades, which are nevertheless
valuable material for manufacturing, and which can not be imported in the
grease because of their heavy shrinkage. Such wools, if imported, might be
used to displace the cheap substitutes now in use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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