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I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. ― Winston S. Churchill
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street. If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat. If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat. If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet. Taxman! Well, I’m the taxman. Yeah, I’m the taxman. — The Beatles (‘‘Taxman’’)
The taxpayer — that’s someone who works for the federal government but doesn’t have to take a civil service examination. — Ronald Reagan
It is your tax which pays for public spending. The government have no money of their own. There is only taxpayers' money. — Margaret Thatcher
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before. — H.L. Mencken
What Mae West said about sex is true about taxes. All tax cuts are good tax cuts; even bad tax cuts are good tax cuts. — Grover Norquist
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." — Ronald Reagan
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. — Voltaire
It should be known that at the beginning of the dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments. — Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah.
Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of ‘‘greed’’ is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned — never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largess dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as ‘‘greed’’ on the part of government or the clientele of government. — Thomas Sowell
Why tribute? Why should we pay tribute? If Caesar can hide the sun from us with a blanket, or put the moon in his pocket, we will pay him tribute for light; else, sir, no more tribute. — William Shakespeare (Cymbeline)
There are those who seem to have nothing else to do but to suggest modes of taxation to men in office. — Robert Peel
That revenue has increased in this way is in no small measure, I am convinced, due to our low tax policy which has helped to generate an economic expansion in the face of unfavourable circumstances. — John James Cowperthwaite
The best way to restrain the politicians' impulse to spend and to expand government's reach is to keep the surplus modest. That means lowering taxes. — R. Emmett Tyrrell
[Responding to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone's question as to the practical uses of electricity:] Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it! — Michael Faraday
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. — George Bernard Shaw
Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labours. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, tax-sold farms and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter. — G.K. Chesterton
The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. — Henry Hazlitt
The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. — James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg
There is no art which one government sooner learns from another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. — Adam Smith
The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. — Jean Baptiste Colbert
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. — Adam Smith
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. — P.J. O'Rourke
Every man, to be sure, is desirous of pushing off from himself the burden of any tax, which is imposed, and of laying it upon others. — David Hume
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. — Vladimir I. Lenin
Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes - and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric. — Thomas Sowell
It is 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. — George W. Bush
I'd like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That's what I want. I don't want to get taxed just because I died. I just don't think it's right. If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax. Why should I have to pay it again because I died? — Whoopi Goldberg
A tax . . . may obstruct the industry of the people, and discourage them from applying to certain branches of business which might give maintenance and employment to great multitudes. While it obliges the people to pay, it may thus diminish, or perhaps destroy, some of the funds which might enable them more easily to do so. — Adam Smith
I will tell you a secret, which I learned many years ago from the commissioners of the customs in London: They said, when any commodity appeared to be taxed above a moderate rate, the consequence was to lessen that branch of the revenue by one half; and one of those gentlemen pleasantly told me, that the mistake of Parliaments, on such occasions, was owing to an error in computing two and two to make four; whereas in the business of laying heavy impositions, two and two never make more than one; which happens by lessening the import, and the strong temptation of running such goods as paid high duties. — Jonathan Swift
The high duties which have been imposed upon the importation of many different sorts of foreign goods, in order to discourage their consumption in Great Britain, have in many cases served only to encourage smuggling; and in all cases have reduced the revenue of the customs below what more moderate duties would have afforded. The saying of Dr. Swift, that in the arithmetic of the customs two and two, instead of making four, make sometimes only one, holds perfectly true with regard to such heavy duties. — Adam Smith
High taxes frequently afford a smaller revenue to the government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes. — Adam Smith
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin. — Mark Twain
[As the Roman Empire declined] the resources of the farmers were exhausted by outrageous burdens of all taxes, the fields were abandoned, and the cultivated land reverted to waste. — Lactantius
Experience does not show that the higher tax rate produces the larger revenue. Experience is all the other way. There is no escaping that when the taxation of large incomes is excessive they tend to disappear. — Calvin Coolidge
It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates... An economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits. — John F. Kennedy
Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. For to take the opposite view today is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more - and who, when at last his account is balanced with nought on both sides, is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss. — John Maynard Keynes
The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital ... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy. — John F. Kennedy
The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public. Welfare is only a species of legalized larceny. — Calvin Coolidge
It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money. - Arthur Laffer
The tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending. — Arthur Laffer
There are several states that move from Karl Marx-like policies to Adam Smith-like policies and back again in a weekend. So for the states with huge volatility in their income tax policies over time, the differences in growth rates in those periods are really amazingly consistent with tax rates really mattering. — Arthur Laffer
The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice. — Thomas Sowell
High tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring the government as much revenue as lower tax rates that they do pay. — Thomas Sowell
Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all. — Thomas Sowell
It is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. Inflation is the most universal tax of all. — Thomas Sowell
Someone once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. That may have been true when he said it, but today taxes are mostly the price we pay so that politicians can play Santa Claus and get re-elected. — Thomas Sowell
If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption, the collection is eluded and the product to the Treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. — Alexander Hamilton
When taxes are too high, people go hungry. When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit. Act for the people's benefit. Trust them; leave them alone. — Lao Tzu
The politicians say ‘we’ can’t afford a tax cut. Maybe we can’t afford the politicians. — Steve Forbes
The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. — Will Rogers
Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay. — Milton Friedman
It was not until the Abraham Lincoln administration that an income tax was imposed on Americans. Its stated purpose was to finance the war, but it took until 1872 for it to be repealed. During the Grover Cleveland administration, Congress enacted the Income Tax Act of 1894. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1895. It took the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) to make permanent what the Framers feared — today’s income tax. — Walter E. Williams
If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation. — Rush Limbaugh
The income tax reduction and the later excise tax cuts brought new vigor and health to America's economy. They helped us to roll up an unparalleled and impressive record: 88 months of sustained prosperity. This has meant higher pay-checks to the worker and higher profits to the businessman. The unemployment rate has dropped all the way down to 3-5 percent, the lowest in 15 years. Never before have so many of our citizens shared in so much of the Nation's prosperity. — President Lyndon Johnson
We have proposed a [tax] reduction this year… on the assumption… that the taxes that were passed during the Second World War and in Korea put such a drain on our economy that… the burden of that taxation strangled the economy and we moved from recession to recession with high and higher rates of unemployment. — President John F. Kennedy
Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kind 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 revenues and achieve a budget surplus. — President John F. Kennedy
[The capital gains tax’s] major impact is to impede entrepreneurial activity and capital formation. While all taxes impede economic growth to one extent or another, the capital gains tax is at the far end of the scale. I argued that the appropriate capital gains tax rate was zero. — Alan Greenspan
My personal observation is that as you go through the process of permanent tax reduction, that there is an awfully good argument to be made for the fact that the revenues of the government actually increase. — Bert Lance
Every dog is allowed one bite, but a different view is taken of a dog that goes on biting all the time. He may not get his licence returned when it falls due. — Harold Wilson
Tax avoidance in the sense of a series of transactions successfully structured to avoid a tax which Parliament intended to impose should be a contradiction in terms. The only way in which Parliament can express an intention to impose a tax is by a statute that means that such a tax is to be imposed. If that is what Parliament means, the courts should be trusted to give effect to its intention. — Lord Hoffman
Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so 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 tax-payers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. This so-called doctrine of ‘the substance’ seems to me to be nothing more than an attempt to make a man pay notwithstanding that he has so ordered his affairs that the amount of tax sought from him is not legally claimable. — Lord Tomlin
My Lords, the highest authorities have always recognised that the subject is entitled so to arrange his affairs as not to attract taxes imposed by the Crown, so far as he can do so within the law, and that he may legitimately claim the advantage of any express terms or of any omissions that he can find in his favour in taxing Acts. In so doing, he neither comes under liability nor incurs blame. — Lord Sumner
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 Inland Revenue is not slow – and quite rightly – to take every advantage which is open to it under the taxing statutes for the purpose of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is, in like manner, entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Revenue. — Lord Clyde
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. — John Maynard Keynes
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. — Nigel Lawson
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient. — Murray Rothbard
When I walk down the street, and a mugger doesn’t take my wallet, he didn’t give me my wallet. This idea that when the government fails to take your money through tax, that it then gave it to you is nonsense. It’s not a gift. — Grover Norquist
Over-taxation is transparently foolish. Most of us are willing to work for our families and neighbours but not for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In a free country people will work hard if it pays them to do so. At present taxes are so high that for many it is not worthwhile working hard, and for some it is not worthwhile working at all. The first step to recovery, therefore, is to lower taxes on earnings. — Margaret Thatcher