The Tariff Tax on Your Breakfast Table
The editor calls out a new federal tariff bill, arguing it will drive up the price of basic staples and line the pockets of trusts.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Dear Mr. Voter: Do you eat food? If so, you are interested in this new tariff tax. The Payne bill puts a tax—a new, additional tax—on your breakfast table. Coffee will come in for a 4-cents-to-the-pound tax. Tea will be taxed 8 cents a pound. When you shake the salt and pepper shaker, you will be paying taxes, if the new Payne bill becomes a law. When you sweeten your tea or coffee you will be paying taxes to the sugar trust. When you wipe your mouth, it will be on a napkin that costs more than it would before the Payne bill. Your plate is sitting on a taxed tablecloth. All table linen goes up about 30 percent. If it is supper time, and you light the lamp, it will be a tribute to the oil trust. And we have not mentioned the subject of clothing, or the added cost of the lumber in your house—if you own a house—or the rent. Do you like this bill to increase the cost of living? It is being crowded through by your congressmen, and by the trusts and corporations who own them. Let us send ten thousand letters from Tacoma to the congressmen and senators from this state, protesting against this tariff outrage.
“Do you like this bill to increase the cost of living?”
The rhetoric of the 'cost of living' crisis caused by distant corporate 'trusts' remains a perennial theme in local news. This 1909 appeal to the everyday consumer shows that economic anxiety in Tacoma was just as much about federal policy as it was about local conditions.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.