Quotes About Income

Income is an important determinant of people's satisfaction with their lives, but it is far less important than most people think. If everyone had the same income, the differences among people in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5 percent.

collecting 10 per cent on high incomes and lower rates on lower incomes constituted undue discrimination against wealth.

The income-tax law in toto has virtually no defenders, even though most fair-minded students of the subject agree that its effect over the half century that it has been in force has been to bring about a huge and healthy redistribution of wealth.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the evolution of our income tax has been from a low-rate tax relying for revenue on the high income group to a high-rate tax relying on the middle and lower-middle income groups.

Before 1900, very few new income taxes appear to have been enacted anywhere without the stimulus of a war.

largest tax

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

For two decades, beginning in the early eighteen-seventies, the very thought of an income tax did not enter the American mind, apart from rare occasions when some Populist or Socialist agitator would propose the establishment of such a tax designed specifically to soak the urban rich.

Before about 1800, only two important attempts were made to establish income taxes—one in Florence during the fifteenth century, and the other in France during the eighteenth. Generally speaking, both represented efforts by grasping rulers to mulct their subjects.

Your index fund should not be your manager's cash cow. It should be your own cash cow.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.

A man's wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on ten dollars, and has everything else he desires, he really is rich.

An entertainer's reputation as a live act is the most valuable thing he or she can have. If people know you give good shows, you'll never be broke for the rest of your life.

I think if I were a superhero saving the world, I'd expect at least not to have to pay income taxes. I mean there should be something in it for a hero who risks his life to save mankind every day.

For my scale, how I grew up and live my life, I'm making plenty of money.

Nearly all educational expenditure should be considered a capital outlay. Education provides a future return in the form of enhanced taxable income and an enhanced quality of life.

The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life.

I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

The new competition is probably keenest in the food industries because we have a very real limitation on what we can consume—in spite of higher incomes and higher living standards, we cannot eat more than we can eat.

Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They're even the same if we take individual workers' IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even

Between 1950 and 2008, Detroit lost over a million people—58 percent of its population. Today one third of its citizens live in poverty. Detroit's median family income is $33,000, about half the U.S. average. In 2009, the city's unemployment rate was 25 percent, which was 9 percentage points more than any other large city and more than 2.5 times the national average. In

Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century.

According to one Harvard study, more students attended America's elite universities from the top 1 per cent of income backgrounds than from the bottom 60 per cent.