J. D. Vance Quotes
Every two weeks, I'd get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.
Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Harper, 2016, p. 139.
Referring to the newly imposed income tax:
The George W. Bush administration when they had a Republican-controlled Congress, had amended the tax laws to treat the earnings of the hedge fund managers differently from people who manage other enterprises in the nation. They gave a group of very wealthy managers whose earnings were already amongst the highest of any managers in the country a huge tax break, while little public attention was paid to the subtlety of complex tax laws. Daschle and others began to draw public attention to the inequity.
An income tax had been instituted during the Civil War but had lapsed. Existing taxes were therefore all excise or head taxes—very regressive. Some politicians began floating the idea of bringing back the Income Tax. But the New York Congressmen objected on the grounds that New York would pay a much higher proportion of the taxes, then their population represented. Under the Civil War, income tax, New York State had paid one/third of the entire national tax burden.
James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman; August 2, 1984) is an American politician, author, attorney, and Marine Corps veteran serving as the 50th vice president of the United States since 2025 under President Donald Trump. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate from 2023 to 2025. After high school, Vance joined the Marine Corps, where he served as a military journalist from 2003 to 2007, and was deployed to the Iraq War for six months in 2005. He graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor's degree in 2009 and Yale Law School with a law degree in 2013. He practiced briefly as a corporate lawyer before embarking on a career in the tech industry as a venture capitalist. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016 and adapted into a film in 2020.
