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Taxes Quotes

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Taxes Quotes

“First, the oil and gas business pays its fair share of taxes. Despite the current debate on energy taxes, few businesses pay more in taxes than oil and gas companies. The worldwide effective tax rate for our industry in 2010 was 40 percent. That's higher than the U.S. statutory rate of 35 percent and the rate for manufacturers of 26.5 percent.”

“Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.”

“Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve -- and I believe this can be done -- a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.”

“Why, I say, that to tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection; it is plunder, and I entirely disclaim it; but I ask you to protect the rights and interests of labour generally in the first place, by allowing no free imports from countries which meet you with countervailing duties; and, in the second place, with respect to agricultural produce, to compensate the soil for the burdens from which other classes are free by an equivalent duty. This is my view of what is called "protection."”

“Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.”

“I hold that two principles are important; first that there should be a steady expansion of public services, not an irregular one related to revenue accruing in any particular year; the second that taxes should be constant over long periods (provided, that is, that they are neither burdensome nor inequitable).”

“Evolutionism is a religious world view that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax supported schools, parks, museums, etc. is a clear violation of the First Amendment.”

“Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.”

“When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so.”

“The flat tax I got on my first meeting with Margaret Thatcher, who I admired very much and who was a great admirer of Milton Friedman. I met her first when I had been prime minister I think for some months and so on, and when I told her what I am planning to do, she looked at me with these big eyes and said: "You are one brave young man." And then a little bit introduced me on the realities of the Western world on which I was not very well informed. But I didn't stop.”

“Modern marriage is first and foremost a romantic and private union, but the tax laws and inheritance laws and religious implications that still surround this institution indicate that marriage has evolved without casting away its earlier purposes or assumptions. It's like we just keep building on this thing, piling new advancements on the old model.”

“John Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy has taken on far greater meaning... more specifically, the power of the Internal Revenue Service is threatening to destroy the freedom of religion , guaranteed by the First Amendment. As part of that guarantee, Congress has granted tax exemptions for churches to avoid excessive interference in their religious activities.”

“Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clean air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.”

“Have you thought about His (God) handling of the gospel? God needs to get a message out to the human race, without which they will perish...foreve r. What's the plan? First, He starts with the most unlikely group ever: a couple of prostitutes, a few fishermen with no better than a second-grade education, a tax collector. Then, he passes the ball to us. Unbelievable.”

“What James Madison and the other men of his generation had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment was that there should be no official relationship of any character between government and any church or many churches, and no levying of taxes for the support of any church, or many churches, or all churches, or any institution conducted by any of them.”

“Now in regard to trades and other means of livelihood, which ones are to be considered becoming to a gentleman and which ones are vulgar, we have been taught, in general, as follows. First, those means of livelihood are rejected as undesirable which incur people's ill-will, as those of tax-gatherers and usurers. Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”

“Where taxes are concerned, there are two clear-cut points of view. There are those who think they're too high and those who think they should be even higher because, after all, politicians spend our money far more wisely than we do. The obvious solution I'd propose is that the people in the first group would pay less and those in the second group would pay more. Lots more.”

“Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax "relief" for the wealthy.”

“So far rich people have been very quiet about the possibility of getting taxes raised on them, but that doesn't mean they won't get mad about it, it just means they don't know about it. Because it takes a while for bad news to reach a rich person. First their accountant has to tell the butler, who has to tell the servant, who wouldn't dare interrupt their game of croquet.”

“I'll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize . You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you'll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.”

“I think that a lot of teenagers think they got it all down-pat. Especially when they first move out and they're on their own for the first time. Oh this is easy, this is breezy. Then all of a sudden it hits you in your mid-twenties that maybe you don't know how to do your taxes still. There's all kinds of things and you start calling your parents up again.”

“The G20 was established as a forum to discuss, first and foremost, world economic issues. If we load it with... Of course, politics affects economic processes, this is obvious, but if we bring some squabbles, or not squabbles, rather, some matters that are really important but relate purely to world politics, we will overload the G20 agenda and instead of addressing such issues as finance, structural economic reforms, tax evasion and so forth, we will engage in endless debates concerning the Syrian crisis or some other global challenges, of which there are many, or the Middle East problem.”

“When I became finance minister in 1991, I discovered that the wealth tax rates income - there was taxation on wealth. It was so atrocious and so high that actually nobody could accumulate money in an honest way. I removed that tax, and the result was that Indian companies for the first time acquired an incentive to grow big, to grow rich.”

“You've got to ask yourself, why won't Donald Trump release his tax returns? I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn't want the American people to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes.”

“Young men and women - young men and women signed up to serve in the military to fight terrorism. Hillary Clinton went to Washington to get funds to rebuild her city, and protect first responders but Donald Trump was fighting a very different fight. It was a fight to avoid paying taxes so that he wouldn't support the fight against terror.”

“Donald Trump has broken his first promise [to release taxes]. Second he stood on this stage last week and when Hillary said you haven't been paying taxes, he said, that makes me smart. So it's smart not to pay for our military. It's smart not to pay for veterans, it's smart not to pay for teachers and I guess all of us who do pay for those things I guess we're stupid.”

“More and more political analysts and weak-kneed politicians are advising the historically pro-life Republican Party to abandon its pro-life stance for political gain. My first response is that if you cannot trust a party on the value of defending human life, how can you trust it on issues like marginal tax rates?”