State Taxation Quotes

U.S. federalism is 50 permanent incentives for entrepreneurial governance. Capital and talent are mobile; they go where they are welcome, and remain where they are well treated. Wise states compete to be hospitable. Unwise ones, with self-defeating insouciance, ignore federalism’s incentives. They denounce such competition as a “race to the bottom.” The top, as those states define it, is a fantasyland where government can extract as much as it wants from immobile wealth.

If businesses don't know from state to state what the requirements are for taxes, they have to waste a lot of money on accountants and lawyers before deciding to expand their business into the state next door.

My view is that we should not be taxing at the Federal level for the things that New Jersey can do for itself.

It is very certain that [the commerce clause] grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.

The Business Profits Tax, which is imposed on in-state businesses, we need to impose the same thing on out-of-state businesses, because the way the Business Profits Tax is calculated, it is highly dependent on how much sales and profits are generated in-state.

The elimination of deductibility of state and local taxes will also encourage more privatization of municipal services.

The State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man

There are 11 states in the United States that in the last 50 years instituted an income tax. So I looked at each of those 11 states over the last 50 years, and I took their current economic metrics and their metrics for the five years before they put in the progressive income tax... Every single state that introduced a progressive income tax has declined as an overall share of the U.S. economy.

Nothing can be clearer than that what the Constitution intended to guard against was the exercise by the general government of the power of directly taxing persons and property within any State through a majority made up from the other States.

We may be assured by past experience, that such a practice [as some states charging high taxes on goods from other states] would be introduced by future contrivances; and both by that and a common knowledge of human affairs, that it would nourish unceasing animosities, and not improbably terminate in serious interruptions of the public tranquility.

In high-tax New York, in high-tax California, the governors of those states are constantly offering tax breaks, tax exemptions to any number of companies if they will locate in those states. The left does it all the time. We point it out every time we learn about it because it's hypocritical.

The reason educational spending in Texas is so low is because you don't have a state tax there, and that's why Texas is big growth because you don't tax people to death.

The Illinois Constitution was written before they realized they'd have a city the size of Chicago in the state. The constitution had severe limits on the ability of any city to raise monies through taxes and bonds. When Chicago grew explosively, they had to come up with ways of getting more money to do more things.

No matter how you slice it, limiting the SALT deduction forces New Jersey families to spend even more to subsidize Americans in less economically productive states, which take more than they ever give back to the federal government.

We are closing corporate loopholes so we are hardly being heroic to close the combined reporting loophole. I think 28 or 30 other states have done it and a lot of those states will be trying to get Amazon.