Quotes About Taxation

If people want capital gains taxed more like the highest rate on income, that's a good discussion. Maybe that's the way to help close the deficit.

He answered some governors who had written to recommend an increase in the burden of provincial taxation, with: 'A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay them.

Since Alexander Hamilton, an increasing percentage of the federal budget had been provided by taxing alcohol. In the early 1900s taxes on liquor made up almost 30 percent of the federal budget—a seemingly implacable obstacle to Prohibition. Now, with the passage of an amendment that allowed a broader tax, the government could give up the alcohol taxes for income taxes.

Governments, of course, can - and do - soak the rich.

And here's the fact: the fact is it doesn't solve the problem. First of all, if you taxed these people at 100 percent, basically next year you said, 'Look, every penny you make next year the government's going to take it from you,' it still doesn't solve the debt.

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

So, let's summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South

public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation

ARISTIDES Father of Just Taxation He drew up a list of assessments not only with scrupulous integrity and justice, but also in such a way that all states felt they had been justly and fairly taxed. . . . The levy of Aristides was a golden age for the allies of Athens. —Plutarch, Life of Aristides

If you, as a company, can get a deal that I, as a company, cannot get, you can compete with me but not on the merits, because your tax burden is not the same as mine.

While the middle class is bled dry to meet various the expenditure of a bloated government machinery, every revenue collection agency is busy extorting money instead of ensuring compliance.

Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?

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.

Majority rule is not "destroyed" by smaller political units. Quite the contrary; it is rendered more efficient in serving the taxpaying public. Majority rule voting will exist in smaller political units even more efficiently than in larger, more centralized ones. That's why Switzerland, with its highly decentralized system of government and with power vested in more than sixty cantons, is arguably the world's most peaceful and prosperous democracy.

You know, Bob, the real patriots out there are people who earn big incomes—$100,000, $200,000, and $1 million or more a year—and spend it all. Congress should mint a new medal for this type of patriotism, Bob. It would be called the Congressional Medal of Taxation and Consumption. And as long as these patriots keep training their kids to be medal winners, we are in good shape.

Our properties within our own territories [should not] be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own.

So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes and consequences in this world, that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.

We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. Letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

In 1962, Democratic President John F. Kennedy, like both Democratic and Republican Presidents and Secretaries of the Treasury in earlier years, pointed out that "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 rates now.

As world prices fell during the Great Depression, the poll tax imposed on Africans remained the same in money terms, which is to say, it increased in real terms. To ensure the payment of this tax, the colonial official pressured African farmers into growing larger export crops, even at the expense of food. Thus Africans had to depend on government famine relief when local food crops were disappointing.

Everyone's an equal shareholder. Birth shares are inalienable, and death duties are unavoidable. The estate tax is one hundred per cent. In between, you can buy and sell and earn as much as you like.

add to all the others he had levied for the war.