Tax

"No taxation without representation."

"And to all those overburdened by an unfair tax structure, let us provide new hope for real tax reform. Instead of shutting down classrooms, let us shut off tax shelters. Instead of cutting out school lunches, let us cut off tax subsidies for expensive business lunches that are nothing more than food stamps for the rich. The tax cut of our Republican opponents takes the name of tax reform in vain. It is a wonderfully Republican idea that would redistribute income in the wrong direction. It's good news for any of you with incomes over 200,000 dollars a year. For the few of you, it offers a pot of gold worth 14,000 dollars. But the Republican tax cut is bad news for the middle income families. For the many of you, they plan a pittance of 200 dollars a year, and that is not what the Democratic Party means when we say tax reform. The vast majority of Americans cannot afford this panacea from a Republican nominee who has denounced the progressive income tax as the invention of Karl Marx. I am afraid he has confused Karl Marx with Theodore Roosevelt -- that obscure Republican president who sought and fought for a tax system based on ability to pay. Theodore Roosevelt was not Karl Marx, and the Republican tax scheme is not tax reform."

"No is the answer. I think it’s absolutely outrageous. Why should I? [pay US tax]"

"There's a mystic quality about our tax system. No matter how bad it may be from the technical standpoint, it has a vitality because of the very high level of compliance."

"For lots of folks, the tax cuts are lost in a sea of other deduction changes, which also happen January 1"

"Well, that’s the ordinary income. These great fortunes were not made through ordinary incomes. So you probably have to look to the capital gains rate and the estate tax if you want to, you know, create more equity there."

"TurboTax is only free for some users, based on the tax forms they need. For many others, Intuit tells them, after they have invested time and effort gathering and inputting into TurboTax their sensitive personal and financial information to prepare their tax returns, that they cannot continue for free; they will need to upgrade to a paid TurboTax service to complete and file their taxes"

"Black people should refuse to pay any taxes to the racist government, including federal income, estate and sates taxes, while being subjected to exploitation and brutality. The rich and their corporations pay virtually no taxes; it is the poor and workers who bear the brunt of taxation. Yet they receive nothing in return. There are still huge unemployment levels in the Black community, the unemployment and welfare benefits are paltry; the schools are dilapidated; public housing is a disgrace, while rents by absentee landlord properties are exorbitant — all these conditions and more are supposedly corrected by government taxation of income, goods, and services. Wrong! It goes to the Pentagon, defense contractors, and greedy s, who like vultures prey on business with the government."

"I suspect a complex society requires a complex tax law."

"Well, I would say the biggest factor is confusion between the sort of truly free IRS-sponsored option and then a bunch of commercial options that are advertised as free but are not always free. So it becomes very confusing very quickly."

"Let's talk about President-elect Trump's other big priorities. Taxes. He's promised a lot of tax cuts. We have a list of some of them here. Let's take a look. Extending the 2017 tax cuts, further slashing the corporate rate, lifting the cap on deductions for state and local taxes, eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and social security benefits and so on; the estimated price of this to the tune of $9 trillion. Do you believe that President-elect Trump will be able to deliver on all of those tax cuts, Senator?"

"Today’s tax code contains two sets of rules: one for regular wage and salary workers who report virtually all the income they earn; and another for wealthy taxpayers, who are often able to avoid a large share of the taxes they owe."

"The free market’s the best mechanism ever devised to put resources to their most efficient and productive use. … The government isn’t particularly good at that. But the market isn’t so good at making sure that the wealth that’s produced is being distributed fairly or wisely. Some of that wealth has to be plowed back into education, so that the next generation has a fair chance, and to maintain our infrastructure, and provide some sort of safety net for those who lose out in a market economy. And it just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market should pay a bigger share. … When you get rid of the estate tax, you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games."

"Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."

"The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. The State of Pennsylvania now takes--subject to some exceptions--one-tenth of the property left by its citizens. The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death-duties ; and,most significant of all, the new tax is to be a graduated one. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for - public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life."

"It's not fair to tax the same earnings twice—once when you earn them, and again when you die—so we must repeal the death tax."

"In the United States, for example, a majority of the population favors abolition of the estate tax—what the ideologues of the ruling class now call a “death tax”—believing that it affects them, and that it results in the loss of family businesses and farms. In fact, only 2% of the population pays the estate tax, and there is no documented case of families losing their farms or businesses as a result of the tax’s operation. Examples like this—in which the majority have factually inaccurate beliefs, that are in the interests of those with money and power—could, of course, be multiplied. Does this just happen by accident?"

"A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood. We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves. But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows."

"In recorded history, we’ve never even seen a family that’s lost their farm because of an estate tax. It just does not happen"

"But that doesn’t hurt the imaginations of all these politicians who want to use the family farm as a straw man"

"If ... the tax scheme allows enormous intergenerational wealth transfers within families, some families will maintain considerable socioeconomic advantages over others, which allows them to provide better educations and better environments (both residential and familial) for their children, and their children's children. ... Even in a constitutional democracy in which each citizen has a publicly recognized claim to all the basic political and civil liberties, these socioeconomic inequalities would create an informal social hierarchy by birth: some would be born into great wealth and other social and political advantages while others would be born into poverty and its associated disadvantages. ... If, because a social scheme had the characteristics described above, the life prospects of some children were vastly inferior to those of others, it would be reasonable to regard these disadvantaged children as members of the lowest stratum in a descent-based social hierarchy. When such a hierarchy is, and has long been, marked by racial distinctions, equal citizenship, in any meaningful sense, does not obtain. In a society with an established democratic tradition, such a quasi-feudal order does not warrant the allegiance of its most disadvantaged members, especially when these persons are racially stigmatized. Indeed, the existence of such an order creates the suspicion that, despite the society's ostensible commitment to equal civil rights, white supremacy has simply taken a new form."

"“In many parts of the plains thorny jungles grow, behind the good defence of which the people… become stubbornly rebellious… and pay no taxes.”"

"Now of course I am minimising my tax … and if anybody in this country doesn't minimise their tax, they want their heads read."

"In common with my predecessors I regard tax avoidance schemes of the kind invented and implemented in the present case as no better than attempts to cheat the Revenue."

"Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes."

"Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax."

"The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall."

"No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores."

"The more laws are enacted and taxes assessed, the greater the number of lawbreakers and tax evaders."

"We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

"I’m against these aggressive tax avoidance schemes but I’m not just against them, this Government has taken a huge amount of steps to legislate and toughen the laws and go after aggressive tax avoidance schemes for the very simple reason that if people go after these schemes and aggressively avoid tax they’re making it the case that everyone else has to pay higher taxes as a result so I think we should be very clear, tax evasion is illegal and for that you can be prosecuted, you can go to prison for tax evasion. Tax avoidance is in these cases, very aggressive tax avoidance schemes, they are wrong and we should really persuade not to do them and that’s why we have these court cases where the court looks at whether a scheme is really about avoiding tax rather than anything else and the court was very clear in this case."

"Please understand my position. It is, and has always been, the policy of this House to operate on a cash basis; I'm sure you understand why—taxes, a necessary evil, but perhaps more evil than necessary."

"We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect."

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."

"If the Government cannot reduce the "terrific" tax burden on the country, I will predict that you will have a depression that will curl your hair, because we are just taking too much money out of this economy that we need to make the jobs that you have to have as time goes on."

"Every good citizen … should be willing to devote a brief time during some one day in the year, when necessary, to the making up of a listing of his income for taxes … to contribute to his Government, not the scriptural tithe, but a small percentage of his net profits."

"In the usual progress of things, the necessities of a nation in every stage of its existence will be found at least equal to its resources."

"Members of the privileged groups inside Africa always defend themselves by saying that they pay the taxes which keep the government going. At face value this statement sounds reasonable, but on close examination it is really the most absurd argument and shows total ignorance of how the economy functions. Taxes do not produce national wealth and development. Wealth has to be produced out of nature—from tilling the land or mining metals or felling trees or turning raw materials into finished products for human consumption. These things are done by the vast majority of the population who are peasants and workers. There would be no incomes to tax if the laboring population did not work. The incomes given to civil servants, professionals, merchants, come from the store of wealth produced by the community."

"We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much."

"The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits."

"I am not paying taxes because the overwhelming percentage of the budget goes for war purposes. I do not wish to participate in any phase of the collection of such taxes. I do not even want to act as if I think that anyone, including the government, has a right to punish me for an act which I consider honorable."

"Indoors or out, no one relaxes In March, that month of wind and taxes, The wind will presently disappear, The taxes last us all the year."

"Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!"

"Taxes are the existence of the state expressed in economic terms. Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list—the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation."

"No country ever takes notice of the revenue laws of another."

"If the state would be allowed to tax religious and spiritual organizations, it would have the power to control them by modulating taxes. As the U.S. Supreme Court stated in the 1819 decision “,” “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” American legal scholar Ken Jacobsen has discussed the implications of this principle for the Tai Ji Men case. Religious liberty thus requires that religions be tax-exempt, and the exemption in fact preserves the principle of separation rather than denying it."

"Tax offices internationally try to expand the taxation of religious properties by using a variety of arguments. Most of them are not persuasive and raise serious problems of discrimination of minorities and violations of freedom of religion or belief."

"Taxes were part of the decurions’ mandate, and often they collected them, but originally taxpayers perceived them as their representatives, as American scholar noted in the 1920s. If they collected more taxes than expected, they redistributed the surplus among the taxpayers, something which should remain to this day a principle of [taxational] justice but one that not all countries practice."

"Taxes — money that is taken by that big thief called the government."

"The American colonies, all know, were greatly opposed to taxation without representation. They were also, a less celebrated quality, equally opposed to taxation with representation."