Quotes About Taxes

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today. —Herman Wouk

The Internal Revenue Code cannot simply be "fixed," which is amply demonstrated by more than 35 years of attempted tax code reform, each round resulting in yet more complexity and unrelenting, page-after-page, mind-numbing verbiage (now exceeding 54,000 pages containing more than 2.8 million words).

The public frets about cheating with food stamps (the fraud rate is about 1.5 percent) yet doesn't understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all.

Other countries over the decades expanded health-care coverage, adopted family-leave policies, extended mass transit and implemented child allowances to reduce poverty, while the United States bucked the trend by slashing taxes, cutting back hours at public libraries, raising tuition at state universities and allowing infrastructure to decay.

Canadians and Europeans pay higher taxes and get universal health care, less poverty and homelessness, lower addiction rates and arguably more humane societies, and that's probably a worthwhile trade-off.

As hostility toward government spread in America, there have been determined efforts to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and then "starve the beast"--using reduced revenue to justify cuts in services for the disadvantaged. This is both disingenuous and cruel, as well as out of step with the advanced world.

In the United States, we rely on local property taxes to fund public schools, so rich suburbs enjoy first-rate public schools that are a pipeline to the best universities, and underprivileged children suffer in third-rate schools with, often, the worst teachers.

their fellow citizens was to deny them free health care, cut the taxes of the wealthy, privatize what few public assets remained and oppose any regulation of a rampant free market that was benefiting the few, rather than the many.

was the first president to use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon against opponents.

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.

...The more you earn, the less you keep, And now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to take, If the tax-collector hasn't got it before I wake.

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.

The truth of the matter was, of course, that the new taxes would have fallen far more heavily on the rich than on the poor, but it is always easy to sway public opinion by announcing virtuously that the government is spending too much and that taxes must be cut.

There were no peasants doffing their hats here; no one was exempt from paying taxes; all men, in fact, were born equal.

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.

The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.

Did you know I never paid taxes before I came here? The Edema don't own property, as a rule." He gestured at the inn. "I never understood how galling it was. Some smug bastard with a ledger comes into town, makes you pay for the privilege of owning something.

My mother once told me she knew a man who owed fealty to himself," I said. "Owed himself a share of his own taxes every year, and if he were ever threatened, there were treaties in place demanding he provide himself with prompt and loyal military support.

Governments could recognize the huge value added if the two biological parents choose to live together with the child: a tax-credit bonus could reduce the tax burden for those who are taxpayers, and income could be supplemented by an equivalent amount for those who are not. The commitment of young parents to their children benefits us all, and we should be prepared to pay for it. When parents withhold this commitment, the rest of us pay for it – heavily.

As a politician, if you are really interested in tackling inequality to ensure that as many people as possible have 'just enough', then you need to ensure that the rich stop using, as Stiglitz puts it, 'their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending'.

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.

Right. Bribes aren't deductible.

George wrote Taxman, and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.

So, in Europe, they're cutting people's retirement and health benefits. And that's what we want to avoid from happening. They're raising taxes, entering a recession. That's the kind of economic program that President Obama has put in place.