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Show THE FARMER, TAXATION AND FREIGHT RATES j The farmers are waking up to the fact that the taxgatherer is a greater enemy than the middleman or the railroads. Offers to reduce freight rates and market his crops are made by the same politicians who have piled up confiscatory taxes. The average taxes on farm lands in 1922 were 126 per cent greater than in 1924 and that is for the whole United States. Railroad rates are not much higher tan in 1 9 1 4,- and the middleman middle-man is not more exacting or vicious than he was eight years ago. In Couth Dakota tax on farm lands has jumped in eight years from 27 cents an acre to 80 cents an acre. In Iowa from 69 to $1.49. In Idaho from 59 to $1.40. In Kansas, North Dakota, Minnesota, Washington, and Minnesota Minne-sota the burdens of state taxes have risen from I 00 to 300 per cent in ten years. It cost two million dollars to run the Wisconsin state government govern-ment in 1900, and in 1922 it cost $28,000,000. In 1910 first class railroads paid $1 10,000,000 taxes, and in 1923 $334,000,000. The last thirty days of 1923 the railroads were paying at the rate of a million dollars a day, and from 70 to 80 per cent of this went to defray the expense of state governments. In his annual report for 1923 Secretary of Agriculture Wallace Wal-lace said that in some states, chiefly western, farmers have paid out one-third of their incomes to tax collectors. "Yet," said the Secretary, "the squander increases while farm values decrease, and the tax-wasters, disguised as Friends of the Farmers, still call for more." The cost of government today, state and federal, is nearly $75 per capita; and it is going up in the states, the cities, towns, counties and townships. Are not enough thoughtful, patriotic citizens willing to stop the increasing waste and combine in running down the spendthrifts. |