Tariffs in United States History - Tariffs and Political Parties

Tariffs and Political Parties

The tariff issue was central to political party debates in the Second Party System, Third Party System and Fourth Party System, from the 1820s to the early 1930s. In general Democrats favored a tariff that would pay the cost of government, but no higher. Whigs and Republicans favored higher tariffs to encourage or "protect" industry and industrial workers. Tariffs were generally low before 1860, and high after that. Since the 1930s, however, tariffs have been very low and have been much less a matter of partisan debate.

Read more about this topic:  Tariffs In United States History

Famous quotes containing the words political and/or parties:

    “Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “A foreign minister, I will maintain it, can never be a good man of business if he is not an agreeable man of pleasure too. Half his business is done by the help of his pleasures: his views are carried on, and perhaps best, and most unsuspectedly, at balls, suppers, assemblies, and parties of pleasure; by intrigues with women, and connections insensibly formed with men, at those unguarded hours of amusement.”
    —Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)