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Taxes Quotes

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Taxes Quotes

“Obama has demonstrated no desire to make tough choices. Americans demand a more efficient, effective government, but his budget calls for more taxes and more spending. It employs deceptive accounting gimmicks but does nothing to tackle long-term entitlement problems, nothing to save Medicare or fix Social Security.”

“Taxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate - the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.”

“Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them, and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does this not involve the principle of a national establishment ... ?”

“Jesus refers to the poor over and over again. There are 2,000 verses of Scripture that call upon us to respond to the needs of the poor. And yet, I find that when Christians talked about values in this last election that was not on the agenda, that was not a concern. If you were to get the voter guide of the Christian Coalition, that does not rate. They talk more about tax cuts for people who are wealthy than they do about helping poor people who are in desperate straits.”

“They have passed the big inheritance tax, and that gets you when you are gone. You used to could die and be able to beat taxes, but not now. The undertaker don't go over your body as carefully as the assessor does your accumilated assets, and he gets his before the undertaker. They have it on these big fortunes now where they pay as high as 60 to 70 percent of what they leave. That's mighty expensive dying when it runs into money like that, and you won't see 'em dropping off as casually as they have been.”

“Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.”

“The continual whine of lamenting the burden of taxes, however successfully it may be practiced in mixed governments, is inconsistent with the sense and spirit of a republic. If taxes are necessary, they are of course advantageous, but if they require an apology, the apology itself implies an impeachment. Why, then, is man imposed upon, or why does he impose upon himself?”

“The physical power to get the money does not seem to me a test of the right to tax. Might does not make right even in taxation. To hold that what the use of official authority may get the state may keep, and that if it cannot get hold of a nonresident stockholder it may hold the company as hostage for him, is strange constitutional doctrine to me.”

“Germany is a fascinating role model. The Germans have maintained their manufacturing edge despite being a high-tax, high-regulation economy. Why? Because the government really set about ensuring that it maintained funding for technical training, technical advancements and programs. It made a concerted effort to retain high-end, complex manufacturing -- the kind of BMW model, if you will. And they've done that so successfully that Germany, which has a quarter of America's population, exports more than America does.”

“When we ask what ought to be the relative remunerations of a nurse or a butcher, or a coal miner and a judge at a high court, of the deep sea diver of the cleaner of sewers, of the organiser of a new industry and a jockey, of the inspector of taxes and the inventor of a life-saving drug, of the jet-pilot or the professor of mathematics, the appeal to 'social justice' does not give us the slightest help in deciding.”

“America must deal once and for all with an utterly irrational health care financing system that allows private interests to make billions in profits from the pain and suffering of their fellow citizens. America is the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide tax-supported universal health care coverage in some form.”

“Ninety-nine percent of everyday things are things we don't need - that goes for regular visits to the hairdresser just as it does for clothing. What would it mean if we all consumed 20 percent less? It would be catastrophic. It would mean 20 percent less jobs, 20 percent less taxes, 20 percent less money for schools, doctors, roads. The global economy would collapse.”

“If the US government spends 40 percent of the nation's income, as it does through either borrowing or taxes, that income is not available for people to spend. The deficit is an indirect method of taxation. Of course, politicians prefer to borrow instead of tax because then someone down the road has to deal with the consequences.”

“What does it mean when Republicans and Democrats alike warn us about the 'pain' involved in cutting government spending - in their spending less of our money? For the average citizen, what pain is there in his keeping more of his money to invest it the way he wants? Taxes cost people. Tax cuts do not cost government.”

“We need to put a price on carbon, and that's what cap-and-trade does and that's also what a CO2 tax does. As long as our current valuation in the marketplace tells us every minute of every day that it's perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of global warming into the thin atmosphere surrounding the planet every 24 hours as if that atmosphere is an open sewer, then the individual actions are not going to solve the problem.”

“Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. ... Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. ... The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”

“And above all, above all, honest work must be rewarded by a fair and just tax system. The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny.”

“Government, not the oil industry, is the biggest 'profiteer' from oil. And it uses the tax revenue to expand its own authority at the expense of the individual, as it does with an endless number of other industries - including electric power, coal, lumber, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, aircraft, and agriculture. The Statist's intrusion to the free market is boundless.”

“Obama does not believe in individual upward mobility. He would penalize it, tax it, regulate it, inveigh against it and disincentivize it. We will be like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We will overcome the currents, the waterfall, the rocks and the predators, and will grapple our way up the stream. Then, at the top of the waterfall will stand Obama the Bear, waiting to scoop us up and have us for dinner. The taxman cometh.”

“In the name of short-term stimulus, he [Obama] will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government.”

“Your generosity is reflected in what you do with your own money, not in what you do with other people's money. If I give a lot of money to charity, then I am generous. If you give a smaller fraction of your money to charity, then you are less generous. But if you want to tax me in order to give my money to charity, that does not make you generous.”

“It's obvious that a lot of Tea Party members tend to be elderly. You've seen that famous sign, 'Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare.' And I think as long as the government does keep its hands off their Medicare, they're fine with talking about low taxes. But once they start to realize that the Republicans really do want to not just cut Medicare, but essentially abolish it, you know, I just think those people are not going to be part of the Tea Party. They're going to be over with Occupy Wall Street.”

“If you're going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum. In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15%-or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening.”

“[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.”

“Trickle down economics is a fraud. Giving tax breaks to the rich and large corporations does not create jobs. It simply makes the rich richer, enlarges the deficit and increases income and wealth inequality. We need economic policies which benefit working families, not the billionaire class.”

“I find it extraordinary that I'm being told I can't trust you the voter to get a government in to protect workers rights and that we need Brussels to defend you, the euro is a broken project we are going to pay, no you are going to pay out of your taxes one bailout out of another and the European union does not protect your jobs.”

“Due to the major demographic changes we have gone through in the last few years in this country, we will be a majority/minority nation and there are a large number of people who do not like that. Donald Trump has tapped into those people's fears because he comes from the extreme right wing part of the Republican Party, as does Ted Cruz. They believe that we should cut taxes to wealthy Americans and enforce anti immigrant laws. They don't believe in Education or Social Security, they would end it and change it and privatize it.”

“The focus, to my mind, is to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States. I think by temperament he is unqualified to be president. I think his views - you have a guy who's running for president who rejects science, doesn't even believe climate change is real, let alone wants to do something about it, wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top two-tenths of one percent.”

“Puerto Rico is a government that is spending money that it doesn't have. What's coming in and what's going out don't match. That is, what they are receiving in taxes is not sufficient to cover the spending that they are taking on. And any entity that does that, whether a family, a business, a government, is going to go broke and bankrupt. They are asking to be given the right to declare bankruptcy, which I think should be an option, as a last resort, if there is no other resource.”

“What does have a chance of becoming law is a process that begins with securing the border. Currently the border is not secure and not just immigrants are coming across, but also drugs, weapons a whole series of problems. And I think that if you can prove to the American people that illegal immigration is under control, I think that the American people are willing to do something very reasonable about people who have been here for many years, who are not criminals, who are going to pay a fine, who are going to pay taxes, who are working.”

“I want to break up the Wall Street banks. Hillary Clinton doesn't. I want to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. She wants $12 an hour. I voted against the War in Iraq. She voted for the War in Iraq. I believe we should ban fracking. She does not. I believe we should have tax on carbon and deal aggressively with climate change. That is not her position.”