Taxation Limits Quotes

I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum.

The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free.

In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.

One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government.

I know of no power, indeed, of which a free people ought to be more jealous, than of that of levying taxes and duties.

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.

At a certain point, you can't tax people beyond a certain level.

The laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union.

We ought not to cripple them [the Australian States] using our power of direct taxation, unless under the stress of some great emergency; we ought to leave them free to enlarge their revenues by direct taxation [income and property taxes], seeing that they will have no power to resort to customs or excise duties if they want additional revenue.

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

Every specific tax, as well as the nation's whole tax system, becomes self-defeating above a certain height of the rates.

If Parliament may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?

They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose.

You either make it illegal, in which case you support a huge underground economy or you tax it within the limits people can afford.

If the Nation is living within its income, its credit is good. If, in some crises, it lives beyond its income for a year or two, it can usually borrow temporarily at reasonable rates. But if, like a spendthrift, it throws discretion to the winds, and is willing to make no sacrifice at all in spending; if it extends its taxing to the limit of the peoples power to pay and continues to pile up deficits, then it is on the road to bankruptcy.

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.

If the exercise of power of internal taxation by the Union should be discovered on experiment to be really inconvenient, the federal government may then forbear the use of it . . .

When you authorised Congress to borrow money, and to contract debts, for carrying on the late war, you could not intend to abridge them of the means of paying their engagements, made on your account. You may observe that their future power is confined to provide common defence and general welfare of the United States. If they apply money to any other purposes, they exceed their powers. The people of the United States who pay, are to be judges how far their money is properly applied.

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.

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.

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions; any bungler can add to the old; but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?

The imposition of taxes has its limits. There is a maximum which cannot be transcended. Suppose the citizen to be taxed by the general government to the utmost extent of his ability, or a thing as much as it can possibly bear, and the state imposes a tax at the same time, which authority is to take it?

Some experts have declared that it is necessary to tax the people until it hurts. I disagree with these sadists.

The United States being a limited form of government, one of the restrictions to which it is subject is in regard to its power to levy taxes. The States may levy them for a great many purposes for which Congress cannot, because to the States belong all of the powers not delegated to Congress.

If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.