Tariff

tar'if, in political economy, a tax levied on imports or exports. In the United States and Great Britain the tariff refers only to imports. The term seems to have been derived, through the Italian and Spanish, from an old Arabic word meaning a list, as of prices or of fees to be paid. A port cape on the southern coast of Spain, at which the Spaniards and Moors were accustomed to collect duties from ships desiring to enter the Mediterranean, was called Tarifa. The collecting of tariff at this point gave name to the port.

A tariff levied for the support of the government only is called a tariff for revenue. A tariff levied with a view to increase the cost of foreign goods and thus to assist native manufacturers, is called a protective tariff. A tariff so high that it practically shuts out foreign goods is called a prohibitive tariff.

In a country as large as ours it is difficult to frame a fair tariff bill. Each section of the country is likely to desire protection for products of local interest. The representatives of these local interests combine to enact a tariff bill few items of which could stand alone.

The first national tariff act was signed by Washington, July 4, 1789. Some of the more noted bills are the tariff of 1824, laying an average tariff of 37 per cent; "the tariff of abominations," 1828; the compromise tariff of 1833; the Walker tariff bill, 1846; the Democratic reduction of 1856; the Morrill tariff, 1861; the McKinley bill, 1890; the Wilson bill, 1894; the Dingley bill, 1897; and the Payne Aldrich tariff of 1909.

The following statement of the Dingley tariff on certain necessaries of life is taken from a leaf of the Democratic campaign book for 1908:

Three-fourths of the tariff duties collected by the United States government annually are paid by twelve articles or classes of articles. These are sugar, cotton manufactures, leaf tobacco, manufactures of fibers, manufactures of silk, manufactures of wool, raw wool, spirits, wines, and malt liquors, manufactures of iron and steel, earthen and chinaware, chemicals and drugs, and fruits and nuts. The total amount paid by these twelve classes of articles in 1907 was $250,000,000, three fourths of the $329,000,000 of tariff duties collected in that year.

In 1909 President Taft called a special session of Congress to redeem the party pledge for revision, but it cannot be said that the result was satisfactory to anybody.

The duties levied by the Payne-Aldrich law do not differ materially from those of the Dingley law quoted above. The following duties on articles in common use were in force in 1910:

Although the amount levied on dutiable article is large and the duties high, many imports are admitted free. Most of these are not produced in America, and some are admitted free because of their educational value. The following are the more important articles on which no duty is levied:

Aconite, agates, amber and ambergris, ammonia, arsenic; animals for breeding, exhibition, or racing purposes; quinine, beeswax; birds, land and water fowl; books, maps, music, engravings, bound or unbound, and charts, and publications by scientific and literary associations; books and pamphlets in raised print, used exclusively by the blind; books, maps, music for the use of any society or institution solely for religious, philosophical, educational, scientific, or literary purposes; bristles, crude; bullion, gold and silver; camphor, crude; chalk, crude; coal, anthracite; coal tar, crude; cocoa, coffee, coins, copper ore, cotton and cotton waste. Diamonds and other precious stones, rough or uncut, including glaziers' and engravers' diamonds not set. Drugs, crude; fans, common palm leaf; furs, undressed; glass, enamel, white, for watch and clock dials; guano, manures; hides; ice, India rubber, indigo; iodine, iridium, ivory tusks; leeches; life boats and life saving apparatus, lithographic stones, meerschaum, models of inventions, needles, hand, sewing and darning; newspapers and periodicals; nuts; oakum; oil cake; cottonseed oil; attar of roses; flavoring oils; benzine, gasoline, naphtha, and similar oils produced from petroleum, also petroleum; ores of gold, silver and nickel; paraffin, parchment and vellum; philosophical and scientific apparatus; phosphates, platinum, potash, quinia, sulphate of and salts of cinchona bark; radium, statuary and casts for art and educational purposes only; sausages, bologna. Seeds, anise, canary, caraway, cauliflower, cotton, cummin, fennel, hemp, hoarhound, mangelwurzel, mustard, rape, sugar beet, sorghum or sugar-cane for seed; bulbs and bulbous roots and n.s.p.f. Shrimps and other shellfish; silk, raw; silk cocoons and silkworm eggs; skeletons and other preparations for anatomy; spices, when unground; ginger root, unground and not preserved or candied; stamps, foreign postage; stone and sand, n.s.p.f.; sulphur, lac, or precipitated; sulphuric acid; tapioca, cassava; tar and pitch; tea; teeth, natural. Tin ore, and tin in bars, blocks, pigs, or grain, or granulated; turpentine, spirits of; turtles; vaccine virus. Wood, logs, and round unmanufactured timber, including pulp woods; woods, in the log, rough or hewn only; works of art and science, brought by professional artists or scientists arriving from abroad, temporarily for exhibition or imported in good faith for exhibition and not intended for sale.

For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1909, the tariff yielded the United States government a total revenue of $300,977,438, as compared with $246,000,000 derived from internal revenue for the same year.