Barack Obama Quotes

When you reduce taxes on higher earners it's vital to be reducing them on lower earning people as well so the nation shares in the approach.

I don't know how anyone can keep a straight face and say they are for deficit reduction while they insist on a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, completely unpaid for.

The fact of the matter is it's very reasonable to ask the wealthiest estates to pay their share. We did that since Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president.

It's not class warfare to suggest that we shouldn't look to seniors and the less fortunate to bear the brunt of deficit reduction. I believe America needs to understand there needs to be a sense of fairness.

We need a budget that will foster economic growth for all of our people, and we need to make taxes more simple and fair for working families - not give handouts to the rich.

It does not help the vast majority of Americans, but it does really well for people already at the top. Well, we're going to turn that upside down. We're going to make the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes for a change.

If you're really concerned about deficits, you cannot take seriously a budget that would give $30 billion a year worth of tax cuts to not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent.

As Vermont's senator and a member of the Budget Committee, I will not support a plan to reduce the deficit that does not call for shared sacrifice.

Our platform calls for a balanced deficit reduction plan where the wealthy pay their fair share. And when your country is in a costly war, with our soldiers sacrificing abroad and our nation facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share isn't class warfare - it's patriotism.

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.

We are all are equal, but some pay higher tax rates than others.

Let's restore sanity and fairness to the tax cut conversation. We simply cannot afford to hand over the bank vault to our nation's millionaires and billionaires while the middle class picks up spare change.

What the Republicans have said is rather than touch one hair on the heads of the wealthiest people in our country, people who make over $1 million a year, they're saying, 'Seniors should pay $6,000 more dollars a year. But please don't let us ask the wealthiest to do their fair share.'

There certainly is a case to be made that taxes should be more progressive.

Bush already gave obscene tax breaks to people like me and Warren Buffet, and we are saying it's not fair.

I agreed with everything he was saying when he ran for president. I was listening to what he said. I go, this guy thinks like me and I agree with him. Now he's changing. All he keeps saying is millionaires and billionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes.

We're going to need to absorb some pain. The Republicans want to pile all the pain on people who can least afford it and the middle class and Democrats under his leadership want to make sure that we can address deficit reduction and continue to make investments and shared sacrifice is going to be imperative in order to be able to do that.

The world is likely to view any temporary extension of the income tax cuts for the top two percent as a prelude to a long-term or permanent extension, and that would hurt economic recovery as well by undermining confidence that we're prepared to make a commitment today to bring down our future deficits.

In 1993, as House Democratic Leader, I led the fight to pass the Clinton-Gore economic plan - a plan designed to slash the deficit, invest in education, cut taxes for working families, and ask the wealthy among us to pay their fair share... Not one Republican voted for that plan. They said it was a job killer.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don't pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money.

In our rush to soak the rich make sure we don't drown the middle class.

Distribute taxes among all in a fair and equitable manner and make them general, not exempting anyone because of his noble rank or great riches, nor even exempting your own officials or courtiers or followers. Do not levy on anyone a tax which is beyond his capacity to pay…

I did a little study of my office, and the average worker pays a higher tax rate than I do. If the government needs money, it should get if from me rather than my secretary of the person who will serve my lunch today.

The most equitable way to substantially reduce the deficit is to delay reductions in the top tax bracket for upper-income taxpayers.