Thomas Sowell Quotes

Taking money in taxes and paying it straight back in subsidies is wrong.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks.

Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

Remember that every dollar spent by the federal government is spent in somebody's district.

Bribing rich people to help poor people, rather than helping poor people directly, is a popular approach because the cost of tax breaks doesn't show up on the government books.

There is spending in the tax code.

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Socialism is a wonderful form of government until you run out of other people’s money.

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

Bad spending, to me, in terms of its economic benefit, would be wealth transfer payments. It's a misallocation of resources.

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.

The Democratic Party might be called the Takings Coalition, made up of groups that want the government to take from American citizens -- usually cash -- and keep it for itself.

When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need.

The government does not add value to the economy. It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another.

Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem. […] Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. […] The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.

Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

Yes, deficits are a problem. I've been saying so for more than a quarter of a century now. But the problem is not the size of the deficit, it's the size of government's claim on our economy.

The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it.

Government has no wealth of its own. Before it gives anything to anyone, it must take from those who produced it.

The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters.

Hold on to your wallets folks because with the passage of this trillion-dollar baby, the Democrats will be poised to spend as much as $3 trillion in your tax dollars. Taxpayers will be on the hook for spending that will stimulate the debt, stimulate the growth of government, but will do little to stimulate jobs or the economy.

If the US government spends 40 percent of the nation's income, as it does through either borrowing or taxes, that income is not available for people to spend. The deficit is an indirect method of taxation. Of course, politicians prefer to borrow instead of tax because then someone down the road has to deal with the consequences.