[DELIVERED BEFORE CONGRESS MAY 27, 1918, BY PRESIDENT WILSON]
It is with unaffected reluctance that I come to ask you to prolong your
session long enough to provide more adequate resources for the Treasury
for the conduct of the war. I have reason to appreciate as fully as you
do how arduous the session has been. Your labors have been severe and
protracted. You have passed a long series of measures which required
the debate of many doubtful questions of judgment and many exceedingly
difficult questions of principle, as well as of practice. The Summer
is upon us, in which labor and counsel are twice arduous and are
constantly apt to be impaired by lassitude and fatigue. The elections
are at hand, and we ought as soon as possible to go and render an
intimate account of our trusteeship to the people who delegated us to
act for them in the weighty and anxious matters that crowd upon us in
these days of critical choice and action. But we dare not go to the
elections until we have done our duty to the full. These are days when
duty stands stark and naked, and even with closed eyes we know it is
there. Excuses are unavailing. We have either done our duty or we have
not. The fact will be as gross and plain as the duty itself. In such a
case lassitude and fatigue seem negligible enough. The facts are tonic
and suffice to freshen the labor.
And the facts are these: Additional revenues must manifestly be
provided for. It would be a most unsound policy to raise too large a
proportion of them by loan, and it is evident that the $4,000,000,000
now provided for by taxation will not of themselves sustain the greatly
enlarged budget to which we must immediately look forward. We cannot in
fairness wait until the end of the fiscal year is at hand to apprise
our people of the taxes they must pay on their earnings of the present
calendar year, whose accountings and expenditures will then be closed.
We cannot get increased taxes unless the country knows what they are
to be and practices the necessary economy to make them available.
Definiteness, early definiteness, as to what its tasks are to be is
absolutely necessary for the successful administration of the Treasury.
It cannot frame fair and workable regulations in haste; and it must
frame its regulations in haste if it is not to know its exact task
until the very eve of its performance. The present tax laws are marred,
moreover, by inequities which ought to be remedied. Indisputable facts,
every one; and we cannot alter or blink them. To state them is argument
enough.