Taxation Impact Quotes

An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.

The power to tax involves the power to destroy;...the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create.

Income taxes are responsible for the transformation of the Federal government from one of limited powers into a vast leviathan whose tentacles reach into almost every aspect of American life.

Whether it's a penalty or a tax, it's all one in the same. It's coming out of somebody's hard-earned money in their pocketbooks and that's the point. So in some ways, to me, it's a distinction without a difference.

The Congressional Budget Office has been embarrassed repeatedly by making projections based on the assumption that tax revenues and tax rates move in the same direction.

It is my view that what is important is cutting government spending, however spending is financed. A so-called deficit is a disguised and hidden form of taxation. The real burden on the public is what government spends (and mandates others to spend). As I have said repeatedly, I would rather have government spend one trillion dollars with a deficit of a half a trillion than have government spend two trillion dollars with no deficit.

We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom, and yet it clearly is one.

Raising taxes does nothing to allow the economy to recover.

That darn luxury tax is pretty painful.

The appropriation of public money always is perfectly lovely until some one is asked to pay the bill. If we are to have a billion dollars of navy, half a billion of farm relief, etc... the people will have to furnish more revenue by paying more taxes. It is for them, through their Congress, to decide how far they wish to go.

There is no such thing as a good tax.

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys.

An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough jobs or enough profits

The present tax codes inhibit the mobility and formation of capital, add complexities and inequities which undermine the morale of the taxpayer, and make tax avoidance rather than market factors a prime consideration in too many economic decisions.

There is no - let me repeat - no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.

When private industry makes a mistake, it gets corrected and goes away. As governments make mistakes, it gets bigger, bigger and bigger and they make more, more and more because as they run out of money, they just ask for more and so they get rewarded for making mistakes. In the meantime that is exactly what we are doing by subsidizing companies which are failing, we have a reverse Darwinism, we've got survival of the unfittest, the companies and people that have made terrible mistakes are being rewarded and other people are being punished and being taxed.

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.

If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.

Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients-the education industry, the welfare culture, public-employee unions, etc.

Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget.

The burden of the national debt consists not in its being so many millions, or so many hundred millions, but in the quantity of taxes collected every year to pay the interest. If this quantity continue the same, the burden of the national debt is the same to all intents and purposes, be the capital more or less.

If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing.

There is not that intimate and inseparable relation between the electors of Great-Britain, and the inhabitants of the colonies, which must inevitably involve both in the same taxation; on the contrary, not a single actual elector in England might be immediately affected by a taxation in America, imposed by a statute which would have a general operation and effect, upon the properties of the inhabitants of the colonies. The latter might be oppressed in a thousand shapes, without any sympathy, or exciting any alarm in the former.

It is from the power of taxation being in the hands of those who can throw so great a part of it from their own shoulders, that it has raged without a check.