Charles Boustany Quotes

Our 15 thousand page tax code is incomprehensible and unenforceable.

No average citizen in America today can figure out the tax code.

We have always looked at taxes as a cost, just as any other cost that comes with doing business.

When you look at the government, when the government collects a buck, it's not free. They have to spend resources, the IRS, audits, all this sort of crap, to collect the dollar. I'm not assuming any Laffer curve effect here at all. There are just transactions costs of collecting that money.

Our tax code is arcane, burdensome and unwieldy. In the years since Ronald Reagan's 1986 Tax Reform Act, the code has gone from fewer than 30,000 pages to more than 70,000.

As American taxpayers know too well, the tax code is incredibly complex and compliance is all to expensive.

We want taxpayers, not tax wasters.

Taxation under every form presents but a choice of evils.

Something is terribly wrong with the tax laws of this country and the way they are enforced. So I quit.

The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate. The more convoluted the tax code becomes, the more time we have to take off work to comply with it.

For years, people have begged Washington for a tax code that is simple and easy to understand.

The tax code is just too big.

I don't know why anyone would prefer a more complicated tax code instead of a simpler one.

The real problem in Greece is not cutting taxes, it's making sure that we don't have tax evasion.

The tax code is now nine times longer than the Bible, and not nearly as interesting.

Every time you exempt a portion of the economy from taxation you put pressure on the rest of the economy.

We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some [tax] violation

Taxes are always too high.

It seems idle to speculate in the abstract as to whether or not a progressive income tax schedule rising to rates in excess of 70 percent are justifiable …. The fact is that such rates cannot be successfully collected.

Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance

Look at the current tax code. It’s a 10 million word mess..

The Internal Revenue Code is like a tire that has been patched over and over…. At this point however, it is more patch than tire.

The United States is the only country where it takes more brains to figure your tax than to earn the money to pay it.

A tax code becomes an instrument of social policy.

The tax code has been flawed and inefficient for a very long time, precisely because fixing it could be so terribly disruptive.