SINGULAR GOVERNMENT

Patea Mail, Volume I, Issue 1, 24 October 1887, Page 3

SINGULAR GOVERNMENT

While most Governments are greatly put out to raise revenue, the problem ■which the American Congress has to solve is how to stop the collection of an enormous surplus revenue of about one hundred million dollars a yetir. The taxes can only be reduced in two ways—either by lowering the duties on imported goods, or by abolishing the excise du ies on spirits and tobacco. The first means an interference with the policy of Protection, the second means thestimulation of drunkenness and vice by cheap rum. But if the taxes cannot bo reduced, what is to be done with the surplus ? asks the correspondent of a contemporary. Two thousand millions of dollars of debt have already been paid off in 20 years, and only about one thousand millions of interest-bearing bonds are now outstanding, and none of those can be redeemed before 1891, ■while it will be 1910 before the States shall have the privilege of paying off certain others. To go into the open market and pay a premium for the boon of extinguishing debts is scarcely a possible course for a wise man, but even it Congress permitted the Secretary to do so the premium would soon rise to an impossible figure. The more the question is studied the more hopeless of solution does it become ; and this, of course, is the real reason why the Congress bequeathed is as an interesting legacy to its successor.