Taxation Power Quotes

The power to tax is not the power to destroy.

The power to tax is the power to destroy.

The power to tax and spend is restricted by the enumerated powers.

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

The power of taxing people and their property is essential to the very existence of government.

The power to tax is the power to govern.

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

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

The present Congress have as complete authority to require of the States indefinite supplies of money for the common defense and general welfare, as the future Congress will have to require them of individual citizens; and the latter will be no more bound than the States themselves have been, to pay the quotas respectively taxed on them.

Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it.

Only the State legally obtains its revenue by coercion.

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

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.

Besides, we had a large debt, contracted at home and abroad in our War of Independence; therefore the great power of taxation was conferred upon this Government.

No tax may be laid without the consent of the nation

When the stamp-act was made, the authority of parliament to impose internal taxes was denied, but their right to impose external ones … to lay duties upon goods … was admitted. When the act was made imposing duties upon tea, … a new distinction was set up, that the parliament had a right to lay duties … for the purpose of regulating trade but not for the purpose of raising a revenue.

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.

I like the power given the Legislature to levy taxes, and for that reason solely approve of the greater house being chosen by the people directly.

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.

The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.

Of all the powers conferred upon government, that of taxation is most liable to abuse.

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay

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 . . .

The judicial cannot prescribe to the legislative departments of the government limitations upon exercise of its acknowledged powers. The power to tax may be exercised oppressively on persons, but the responsibility … not to the courts, but to the people by whom its members are elected.

The 16th Amendment corroded the American concept of natural rights; ultimately reduced the American citizen to a status of subject, so much so that he is not aware of it; enhanced Executive power to the point of reducing Congress to innocuity; and enabled the central government to bribe the states, once independent units, into subservience. No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people's wealth at its disposal.