Popular quotes about Taxes! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 23
Politicians like to talk about the income tax when they talk about overtaxing the rich, but the income tax is just one part of the total tax system. There are sales taxes, Medicare taxes, social security taxes, unemployment taxes, gasoline taxes, excise taxes - and when you add up all of those taxes [many of which are quite regressive], and then you look at how they affect the rich and the poor, you essentially end up with a system in which the best off 20 percent of Americans pay one percentage point more of their income than the worst off 20 percent of Americans.
David Cay JohnstonI thought you liberals cared about people, but here you're perfectly content to get them addicted to tobacco and make them pay taxes through the nose and continue to pay taxes through the nose and raise their taxes. And then you try to make 'em think you care about 'em by running PSAs telling them how they shouldn't smoke and how they should quit. You're exactly right. If they really cared, they would ban the product, but they can't, because the revenue from tobacco taxes - I'm not kidding you - funds children's health care programs, and a number of other things as well.
Rush LimbaughThe rich people are apparently leaving America. They're giving up their citizenship. These great lovers of America who made their money in this country-when you ask them to pay their fair share of taxes they run abroad. We have 19-year old kids who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan defending this country. They went abroad. Not to escape taxes. They're working class kids who died in wars and now billionaires want to run abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. What patriotism! What love of country!
Bernie SandersThen by the springtime, you'll see us moving an effort to cut taxes for working families, small businesses and family farms to reform our business taxes in this country so that American businesses can compete more effectively with businesses around the world.
Mike PenceDonald Trump is going to lower taxes, Hillary Clinton's going to raise taxes. He's going to add to our military, she's going to decrease our military. He's going to support the police at a time in which we've had the biggest increase in crime in the last 41 years. He's going to take on radical Islamic terrorism.
Rudy GiulianiIn theory, taxes should be like shopping. What I buy is government services. What I pay are my taxes.
P. J. O'RourkeNo matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay the taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil. It is your fellow workers who are ordered to work for the Government, every time an appropriation bill is passed. The people pay the expense of government, often many times over, in the increased cost of living. I want taxes to be less, that the people may have more.
Calvin CoolidgeUp until 1986, the top marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50 percent. Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure is on to lower that even further. And this just doesn't make a great deal of sense. When people say, 'Oh, we can't raise taxes on the rich. They'll go on strike, they'll move to another country.' But within recent memory, it hasn't been that long ago that we had rates that were substantially higher. And these people did just fine. I just think that there's a disconnect between the facts of what taxes do and the sort of mythology of what they do.
Bruce BartlettHillary Clinton is raising your taxes, folks. You can look at me. She's raising your taxes really high. And what that's going to do is a disaster for the country.
Donald TrumpBenjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I'd like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.
Ruth Ann MinnerThe only one benefiting from this, the American taxpayer, almost half of our taxes, our income taxes, are going to the military and to these wars.
Jill SteinPeople want just taxes more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.
Will RogersWhether it's being repealing or replacing Obamacare, rolling back excessive regulations, making the kind of investments that'll support infrastructure, or reducing taxes and reforming business taxes across the country. That's just a sampling of the things that we're working on right now.
Mike PenceNothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.
Ludwig von MisesIt was an absurd theory that by cutting taxes you would increase government revenues, because the growth of the economy would create an overflow of taxes that would fall into the government coffers.
Sidney BlumenthalOur 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.
Margaret MeadI think that my foundation uses the money better than the government does. In any event, I do pay taxes.
George SorosThe income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.
Alan KeyesThose policies - more taxes, more regulation, more debt, more spending, more government - will make American worse. It just will, in my view.
Jeff SessionsI won't raise taxes, because I do not want to punish the people for the politicians' mistakes.
Arnold SchwarzeneggerSome of you in this room support higher taxes. I welcome your enthusiasm and am glad to report that the IRS takes both money orders and checks.
George W. BushA realistic definition of risk recognizes the potential loss of capital through inflation and taxes, and would include at least the following two factors: The probability that the investment you chose will preserve your capital over the time you intend to invest your funds. The probability the investments you select will outperform alternative investments for this period.
David DremanThe Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.
Bob SchiefferIf you raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, you'll do nothing to address the debt and the deficit. And the thing you might do is you might finally put this economy over another cliff. These millionaires and billionaires are the folks that try to create jobs and help grow the economy.
Joe WalshYou've worked hard all your life. You've paid Medicare taxes for almost 30 years. But under the Republican plan, Medicare won't be there for you. Instead of Medicare as it exists now, under the Republican plan you'll get a voucher that will pay as little as half your Medicare costs when you turn 65โand as little as a quarter in your 80s. And all so that millionaires and billionaires can have a huge tax cut.
David FrumOhioans know who cut their taxes. Nobody else on the ballot did. Ohioans know who is responsible for job growth, and nobody else on the ballot was.
Tom RidgeWhere is the politician who has not promised to fight to the death for lower taxes- and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible?
Barry GoldwaterThe key to revenue growth is tax reform that closes loopholes and that is pro-growth. Then with a growing economy, that's where your revenue growth comes in, not from higher taxes.
John HoevenMy finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.
Barack ObamaWhen it comes to finances, remember that there are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.
Mae WestRick Perry I have a great fondness for. And what Rick Perry has, like Jeb Bush has, it will be interesting to compare their two records as governor, very close, great economic development, low taxes, all the things we want domestically out of a president.
Rudy GiulianiIt took the national debt two hundred years to reach $1 trillion. Supply Side Economics quadrupled the national debt to over $4 trillion in twelve years (1980-1992) under the Republicans. Bill Clinton actually paid down the national debt. How did he do it? He raised taxes. It produced the longest sustained economic expansion in U.S. History.
Ed SchultzThousands of people marched in cities around the country to demand that Donald Trump release his taxes. He dismissed them with a tweet: "Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies. The election is over."
John YangMitt Romney is coming under fire because even though he is a multimillionaire, he only paid 15 percent in taxes. That's not a tax, that's barely a tip.
Jay LenoWhen we are relaxed and reasonable content, we are naturally wise. We accept that life is unpredictable, unreliable. We say jokingly or philosophically, "Nothing is sure except death and taxes," or "God willing and the creek don't rise," reminding each other that, notwithstanding the level of planning, we are continually dealing with being surprised. We get startled. We recover. We are disappointed. We adjust. Mostly-with Wisdom intact-we manage.
Sylvia BoorsteinI decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity in taxation, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.
Madalyn Murray O'HairThere's not an appropriations bill in the last 10 years that the-that Democrats passed in the Congress. We haven't spent any money of your taxes in the last decade.
Chaka FattahNo matter what heights you achieve, even if you're Brad Pitt, the slide is coming, sure as death and taxes.
James CaanI believe that my theory is correct; for whatever be the question upon which I am arguing, whether it be religious, philosophical, political, or economical; whether it affects well-being, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, property, labor, exchange, capital, wages, taxes, population, credit, or Government; at whatever point of the scientific horizon I start from, I invariably come to the same thingโthe solution of the social problem is in liberty.
Frederic BastiatI believe that the levels of taxation advocated by liberals render those taxes a veiled form of theft. 'Give me more than half of your honestly earned money or you will be arrested' is legalized thievery.
Dennis PragerImmigration. There's two plans on the table. Hillary and I believe in comprehensive immigration reform. Donald Trump believes in deportation nation. You've got to pick your choice. Hillary and I want a bipartisan reform that will put keeping families together as the top goal, second, that will help focus enforcement efforts on those who are violent, third, that will do more border control, and, fourth, that will provide a path to citizenship for those who work hard, pay taxes, play by the rules, and take criminal background record checks.
Tim KaineThere is no - let me repeat - no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.
Jonah GoldbergIf I have sex, I know my quarterly estimated taxes must be due. And if it's oral sex, I know it's time to renew my driver's license.
Ray RomanoIf you're a wealthy heir with a trust fund, and you sell stocks, make your 10% gains since Donald Trump, and then you buy other stocks, you can avoid paying taxes. And if your accountant registers your wealth offshore in a Panamanian fund, like Russian kleptocrats do - and as more and more Americans do - you don't have to pay any tax at all, because it's not American income, it's foreign income in an enclave without an income tax.
Michael Hudson