74 Taxation Quotes

The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.

Today the Internal Revenue Code constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. A flat tax would be an enormous step forward.

To the Tax Office: All is over between us. Please don't attempt to communicate with me again.

The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it.

Remember that government doesn't earn one single dollar it spends. In order for you to get money from the government, that money must first be taken from somebody else.

So let's give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That'll teach bin Laden a lesson he won't soon forget.

Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.

Less than fifteen cents to the province and more than twenty-five cents to Ottawa, this is far from being excessive!

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

This is not the time for political fun and games. This is the time for a new beginning. I ask you now to put aside any feelings of frustration or helplessness about our political institutions and join me in this dramatic but responsible plan to reduce the enormous burden of Federal taxation on you and your family.

Liberal Democrats are inexorably opposed to tax cuts, because tax cuts give people more power, and take away from the role of government.

The income tax was devised to give lawyers and certified public accountants business. Few persons can make head, tail, or middle out of it. Einstein admitted he couldn't.

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

Unlike proportionality, progression provides no principle which tells us what the relative burden of different persons ought to be the argument based on the presumed justice of progression provides no limitation, as has often been admitted by its supporters, before all incomes above a certain figure are confiscated, and those below left untaxed.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations... But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation.

EXCISE - A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

The idea of abolishing Income Tax is to me highly attractive, both on other grounds & because it tends to public economy.

Why, the very first act of the State, the compulsory assessment and collection of taxes, is itself an aggression, a violation of equal liberty, and, as such, initiates every subsequent act, even those acts which would be purely defensive if paid out of a treasury filled by voluntary contributions. How is it possible to sanction, under the law of equal liberty, the confiscation of a man's earnings to pay for protection which he has not sought and does not desire? And, if this is an outrage, what name shall we give to such confiscation when the victim is given, instead of bread, a stone, instead of protection, oppression? To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing.

Reflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to - my voice fails me; my inclination indeed carries me no farther - all is confusion beyond it.

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses...in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to dis-elect 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. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper - The Revolution - four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'

It is no part of the functions of the National Government to find employment for the people, and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for his purpose, we should only be taxing 40 millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.

We are indeed perhaps better able than other generations to realize the full meaning of those pious words 'What a change by the grace of God'. Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so called democracies is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion. In answer to that charge I should like to make before the German people the following solemn declaration: 1. No one in Germany has in the past been persecuted because of his religious views (Einstellung), nor will anyone in the future be so persecuted. : The Churches are the greatest landed proprietors after the State. : Further, the Church in the National Socialist State is in many ways favoured in regard to taxation, and for gifts, legacies, &c., it enjoys immunity from taxation. It is therefore, to put mildly-effrontery when especially foreign politicians make bold to speak of hostility to religion in the Third Reich. : I would allow myself only one question: what contributions during the same period have France, England, or the United States made through the State from the public funds? 3. The National Socialist State has not closed a church, nor has it prevented the holding of a religious service, nor has it ever exercised any influence upon the form of a religious service. It has not exercised any pressure upon the doctrine nor on the profession of faith of any of the Confessions. In the National Socialist State anyone is free to seek his blessedness after his own fashion. : There are ten thousands and ten thousands of priests of all the Christian Confessions who perform their ecclesiastical duties just as well as or probably better than the political agitators without ever coming into conflict with the laws of the State. : This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavoured to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives.... But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.

By comparative standards, the country is undertaxed. And it's also regressively taxed, the tax burden falls mostly on the poor. What we need is a progressive tax system, of, incidentally, the kind that Jefferson advocated. You know, traditional libertarians, like Jefferson, advocated sharply progressive taxes, because they wanted a system of relative equality, knowing that that's a prerequisite for democracy. Jefferson specifically advocated it. We don't have it anymore, it's sort of there in legislation but it's gone. What we need is different social policies. And social policies which ought to be funded by the people who are gonna benefit from it, that's the general public. So we'd be a lot better off if we were higher taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are. I mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes sense to pay them for that work, they're doing important work for the society. [applause] And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.

Such taxes [upon the necessaries of life], when they have grown up to a certain height, are a curse equal to the barrenness of the earth and the inclemency of the heavens; and yet it is in the richest and most industrious countries that they have been most generally imposed. No other countries could support so great a disorder.

Barack spoke out against the war [in Iraq] before it started, and he respects civil liberties, and I respect him for that. [...] But Barack Obama is not going to talk about the goal of getting rid of the income tax and dealing with monetary policy. I mean, he's too much into the welfare state issue, not quite understanding how free market economics is the truly compassionate system. If we care about the poor and want to help the poor, you have to have free markets. You can't have a welfare state in order to try to take care of people.

'I think we should take money from everyone,' I told her, 'regardless of their ability to pay. After all, this is America.'

Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America - middle-class America - whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America - narrow-interest America - whose every wish is Washington's command. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a president.

The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens' desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm's-length system of public obligation. The principle tool of that obligation was taxation.

On the level of political principle, the imposition of taxes and the expenditure of tax proceeds are governmental functions. We have established elaborate constitutional, parliamentary and judicial provisions to control these functions, to assure that taxes are imposed so far as possible in accordance with the preferences and desires of the public - after all, 'taxation without representation' was one of the battle cries of the American Revolution. We have a system of checks and balances to separate the legislative function of imposing taxes and enacting expenditures from the executive function of collecting taxes and administering expenditure programs and from the judicial function of mediating disputes and interpreting the law. Here the businessman - self-selected or appointed directly or indirectly by stockholders - is to be simultaneously legislator, executive and, jurist. He is to decide whom to tax by how much and for what purpose, and he is to spend the proceeds - all this guided only by general exhortations from on high to restrain inflation, improve the environment, fight poverty and so on and on.

In a dictatorship, taxation is theft. In a true democratic community, people make decisions, including decisions about how to deal with problems of concern to the community, like schools, health services, transportation, etc. Insofar as this leads to expenditures, they make decisions about taxes or some counterpart. There is no theft. Societies like ours are somewhere in between. To take your case, suppose your neighbor never uses a road or a bus at the other end of town. Why should he fund it? Maybe we should each just pay for the roads we use -- and that means, of course, that we have to prevent others from using them, so we hire private armies, and if someone comes along with a bigger army we get nuclear weapons to keep them from using our road, and... Actually, proposals like this are made, in all seriousness, in literature that is taken seriously. And it extends to everything else, leading to a world in which no sane person would want to live, even if it would be possible to survive in it.

Let us go back to 1909, when the American people were offered a plan for destroying nations that had been formulated again by a filthy degenerate named Mordechai, alias Karl Marx. Now it's true that the promoters hired a few journalists, liberal professors, and other intellectual prostitutes, to prove conclusively that the proposed income tax could never under any circumstances exceed four per cent. on the income of millionaires and could never affect anyone else, for the obvious reason that no federal government could possibly spend so much money. But the point is that a majority of the American people -- the inheritors of a free government based on the premise that government must be limited to essentials and must be tied down by the chains of a stringent constitution restraining the exercise of all powers except those deemed absolutely necessary for national defense -- those American people believed that hogwash. In effect, what the promoters were telling them in wheedling tones was, 'Come, little boobies, put your heads into the noose and we'll do you lots of good.' And the boobous little boobies stuck their necks into the noose, and so the country is now under the regime of the great White Slave Act, and that's why we are where we are today.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

Countries, therefore, when lawmaking falls exclusively to the lot of the poor cannot hope for much economy in public expenditure; expenses will always be considerable, either because taxes cannot touch those who vote for them or because they are assessed. in a way to prevent that.

The goal to strive for is a poor government but a rich people.

The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.

To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.

When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government.

The best thing we can do for family values is to repeal the income tax. Then families will have the resources they need to implement their own values -- and not those of the politicians. With the income tax gone, families will no longer be forced to have two breadwinners by necessity. Children will be raised better, family values will predominate, and crime will diminish. If your local school indoctrinates your child with values that are alien to you, you'll have the money to buy a private education.

The income tax has destroyed the concept of financial privacy. It has demolished the idea that a man's home is his castle. It has provided unlimited funding for politicians to wreck lives and property. It has forced one-earner families to become two-earner households -- leading to decreased parental supervision of children; loss of family values; and increased crime, promiscuity and drug use. So long as the government has the power to invade our lives, rummage through our records, and take what it wants from our income, we will have only as much freedom and take-home pay as the politicians condescend to let us have.

Taxation without representation is tyranny.

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that we have a choice between cutting tax and cutting unemployment, for the two go hand in hand.

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

The theory of the IRS is rather repugnant to me because the assumption is made that I, the government, owns 100% of your income and I permit you to keep 5%, 10% or 20%. You're vulnerable, you've sold out. The government can take 80% if they want, which they did at one time.

The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.

Both of the great political parties now represented in the Government have by repeated and authoritative declarations condemned the condition of our laws which permit the collection from the people of unnecessary revenue, and have in the most solemn manner promised its correction; and neither as citizens nor partisans are our countrymen in a mood to condone the deliberate violation of these pledges. Our progress toward a wise conclusion will not be improved by dwelling upon the theories of protection and free trade. This savors too much of bandying epithets. It is a condition which confronts us - not a theory. Relief from this condition may involve a slight reduction of the advantages which we award our home productions, but the entire withdrawal of such advantages should not be contemplated. The question of free trade is absolutely irrelevant, and the persistent claim made in certain quarters that all the efforts to relieve the people from unjust and unnecessary taxation are schemes of so-called free traders is mischievous and far removed from any consideration for the public good.