Austan Goolsbee Quotes

Whenever you find a tax loophole, someone else is going to call it a tax incentive.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

I'm not gonna give the British Government the joy of keeping taxing me. They don't tax art. And all my cars are just a collection of art.

There's always another loophole to get out of the tax code.

We can’t write a tax law that their lawyers can’t get around.

In this country, we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax.

A Tax Loophole: A deduction that the other guy gets.

A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.

I was the first businessman to say, 'You should give tax benefit to only small companies. You should say your profits are exempt to a limit of Rs. 50 crore or so, but beyond that, you should pay taxes.' I have been arguing with successive finance ministers on this.

We're going to look awfully stupid if we give income tax relief to people who do not pay income taxes.

Most large companies structure their affairs so that they minimize their tax payments. As long as you do it within the law, it's OK.

Businesses large and small shouldn't have to check the expiration date of a tax provision to see if it's still good.

'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.

Business is global. Countries need to react to that; taxes need to be paid where profit arises.

That’s why the tax code is so long [76,000 pages]. So we can take advantage of it.

It’s not easy to get rid of tax loopholes. The reason they are there is that people wanted them there.

When, as an individual, you are not paying taxes, it is evasion. As a corporate, it is legal shrewdness or tax engineering.

My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.

I don't blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage.

When President Obama speaks about raising taxes on the rich, he speaks about high-income employees and small business owners, not entrepreneurs who build big businesses.

One in four corporations doesn't pay any taxes.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

It's not Apple's fault that they're seeking to avoid paying taxes. They're not lying, cheating or stealing. They're following the rules that were created by governments. If the government doesn't like the rules, they can change them.

Yes, the rich will find ways to avoid paying more taxes, courtesy of clever accountants and tax attorneys. But this has always been the case, regardless of where the tax rate is set.