Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
And there are many additional sources of revenue which can justly be
resorted to without hampering the industries of the country or putting any
too great charge upon individual expenditure. A tax of one cent per gallon
on gasoline and naphtha would yield, at the present estimated production,
$10,000,000; a tax of fifty cents per horse power on automobiles and
internal explosion engines, $15,000,000; a stamp tax on bank cheques,
probably $18,000,000; a tax of twenty-five cents per ton on pig iron,
$10,000,000; a tax of twenty-five cents per ton on fabricated iron and
steel, probably $10,000,000. In a country of great industries like this it
ought to be easy to distribute the burdens of taxation without making them
anywhere bear too heavily or too exclusively upon any one set of persons or
undertakings. What is clear is, that the industry of this generation should
pay the bills of this generation.
I have spoken to you to-day, Gentlemen, upon a single theme, the thorough
preparation of the nation to care for its own security and to make sure of
entire freedom to play the impartial role in this hemisphere and in the
world which we all believe to have been providentially assigned to it. I
have had in my mind no thought of any immediate or particular danger
arising out of our relations with other nations. We are at peace with all
the nations of the world, and there is reason to hope that no question in
controversy between this and other Governments will lead to any serious
breach of amicable relations, grave as some differences of attitude and
policy have been land may yet turn out to be. I am sorry to say that the
gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered
within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to
admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous
naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who
have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national
life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our
Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought
it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase
our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue. Their number is not great as
compared with the whole number of those sturdy hosts by which our nation
has been enriched in recent generations out of virile foreign stock; but it
is great enough to have brought deep disgrace upon us and to have made it
necessary that we should promptly make use of processes of law by which we
may be purged of their corrupt distempers. America never witnessed anything
like this before. It never dreamed it possible that men sworn into its own
citizenship, men drawn out of great free stocks such as supplied some of
the best and strongest elements of that little, but how heroic, nation that
in a high day of old staked its very life to free itself from every
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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