David Ricardo Quotes

In reality, every time the government takes an additional dollar in taxes out of someone's pocket, it's a dollar that person will not be able to spend or invest. When government spending goes up, private spending goes down. There is no net effect. No wealth creation.

Here's the problem if you keep raising tax rates: You slow down economic growth.

A one-time tax does not get figured into people's investment decisions.

Anyone can see how if a feared tax hike doesn't happen, that's a positive factor. But even if tax hikes happen as feared, vast history tells me it doesn't have to have the big bad impact folks fear. And fear of a false factor is always bullish.

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

Nobody in this country realizes that cap-and-trade is a tax - and it's a great big one.

Whatever you tax, you get less of.

It's a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes.

We had 90 percent taxes before in America. All right? Didn't work.

There is no such thing as a good tax.

Economists have long understood that taxes do more than raise revenue for the governments that impose them; to some extent, at least, they also discourage and reduce the economic activities that are taxed.

All taxes must, at last, fall upon agriculture.

All taxes have a negative effect on economic activity.

Almost all taxes on production fall finally on the consumer.

Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other

Prices always soar when there is a Congress government.

A tax on capital is self-defeating, in that it slows down capital accumulation, investment and economic growth.

The easy way out is to increase taxes.

You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should also ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation?

But a tax on luxuries would no other effect than to raise their price. It would fall wholly on the consumer, and could neither increase wages nor lower profits.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet, they're taxed. Then they go and get the cup of coffee, they're taxed....This goes on all day long. Tax, tax, tax.

You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.

It was absolutely critical to renew the Bush tax cuts. Letting them expire would result in a massive tax increase that would retard economic growth.

Tax increases appear to have a very large sustained and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects