They are for the purpose of encouraging industry in order that employment may be plentiful.
Calvin Coolidge
The Public Record
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th President of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. A member of the Republican Party, he was known for his quiet demeanor and strong support for business and limited government. Coolidge's presidency is often associated with the economic prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, and he famously advocated for a hands-off approach to the economy, believing that government should interfere as little as possible in the lives of citizens and businesses.
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All these economic results are being sought not to benefit the rich, but to benefit the people.
Determination of a revenue law definitely, promptly and solely as a revenue law, is one of the greatest gifts a legislature can bestow upon its constituents.
Any further extension along these lines would, in my opinion, impair the integrity of our income-tax system.
The purpose of reducing expenditures is to secure a reduction in taxes.
But it ought to resist every effort to weaken or break down this most beneficial system of supervising appropriations and expenditures.
Economy is the method by which we prepare to-day to afford the improvements of to-morrow.
It is an avoidance of waste that there may be the means for an outlay to-day which will bring larger returns to-morrow.
While we should avoid as far as possible increases in permanent current expenditures, oftentimes a capital outlay like internal improvements will result in actual constructive saving.
The real improvement, however, must come not from additional curtailment of expenses, but by a more intelligent, more ordered spending.
As we reduce our debt our interest charges decline.
These enormous expenditures ought not to be increased, but through every possible effort they ought to be reduced.
All proposals for assuming new obligations ought to be postponed, unless they are reproductive capital investments or are such as are absolutely necessary at this time.
When the country is prosperous and free from debt, when the rate of taxation is low, opportunity exists for assuming new burdens and undertaking new enterprises.
The power over the purse is the power over liberty.
No right exists to levy on a dollar, or to order the expenditure of a dollar, of the money of the people, except for a necessary public purpose duly authorized by the Constitution.
The Government has no justification in taking private Property except for a public purpose.
It does not belong to the Government, it belongs to the people.
The wealth of our country is not public wealth, but private wealth.
Neither of these can be impaired except by due process of law.
They hold inviolate in their own hands the jurisdiction over their own freedom and the ownership of their own property.
While they recognize the undeniable authority of the state, they have established as its instrument a Government of limited powers.
It is a fundamental principle of our country that the people are sovereign.
The wiser policy is to leave the localities, so far as we can, possessed of their own sources of revenue and charged with their own obligations.
Society is in much more danger from encumbering the National Government beyond its wisdom to comprehend, or its ability to administer, than from leaving the local communities to bear their own burdens and remedy their own evils.
Politicians like Calvin Coolidge
