Top 100 Quotes About Taxation
#1. Taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#2. My legislation, the Simple Savings Tax Relief Act of 2005, simply eliminates the taxation of interest earned in savings accounts, such as passbook savings accounts or bank certificates of deposit.
Cliff Stearns
#3. The United States has a system of taxation by confession
Hugo Black
#4. New taxes are so unpopular that most 'social' handout schemes are originally enacted without enough increased taxation to pay for them. The result is chronic government deficits, paid for by the issuance of additional paper money.
Henry Hazlitt
#5. significant component of the federal law of tax-exempt organizations is the body of tax law concerning the conduct and taxation of unrelated trade
Anonymous
#6. Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.
Ludwig Von Mises
#8. Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.
J.M. Roberts
#9. The only way for the state to finance its operations is through the forcible expropriation of productive wealth from its citizens.
Daniel Alexander Brackins
#10. What I agree with is that we need a significantly changed taxation system. And the one that I've advocated is based on tithing, because I think God is a pretty fair guy. And he said, you know, if you give me a tithe, it doesn't matter how much you make.
Ben Carson
#11. It is evident from the state of the country, from the habits of the people, from the experience we have had on the point itself, that it is impracticable to raise any very considerable sums by direct taxation.
Alexander Hamilton
#12. The best way for the Government to maintain its credit is to pay as it goes-not by resorting to loans, but by keeping out of debt-through an adequate income secured by a system of taxation, external or internal, or both.
William McKinley
#13. Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.
Ronald Reagan
#14. I'll govern for the good of the governed.
I'll make sure every citizen is properly educated and doctored.
I'll cease wasteful spending and ease the burden on the poor through redistribution of land and goods and taxation.
Erika Johansen
#15. There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
Isabel Paterson
#16. The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others.
Robert Ringer
#17. We can fight over what the taxation levels should be, but the tax system should be very, very simple and not distortionary.
Adam Davidson
#18. The Government is able to afford a suitable army and a suitable navy. It may maintain them without the slightest danger to the Republic or the cause of free institutions, and fear of additional taxation ought not to change a proper policy in this regard.
William Howard Taft
#19. The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor.
William Cobbett
#20. By the end of the Twentieth Century, taxation will be reduced to a minimum, the entire world will be open to trade, and there will be no need of a standing army.
Erastus Wiman
#21. Inflation is a form of hidden taxation which it is almost impossible to measure.
John J. Beckley
#22. To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
Antonin Scalia
#23. Justice requires that you should not place the burdens of one man on the shoulders of another man, even though he is better able to bear them. In plainer words, that you should not make one set of men pay for what is used by another set of men.
Auberon Herbert
#24. Taxation of private property, or the regulation of such property so as to reduce its value, can become in effect a form of servitude.
Mark Levin
#25. Everything a politician promises at election time has to be paid for either by higher taxation or by borrowing.
Margaret Thatcher
#28. The better an entrepreneur succeeds, the more is he vilified and themore is he soaked by taxation.
Ludwig Von Mises
#29. Men like Henry George [ the pioneer of land value taxation] are rare, unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form, and fervent love of justice.
Albert Einstein
#30. Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.
Russell Kirk
#31. Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power.
Peter Schiff
#32. PPLI is one of the greatest investment products out there for those who want to protect their money from unnecessary taxation and leave it for future generations.
Jonathan Feldman
#33. Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
H.L. Mencken
#34. 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.
Alexander Hamilton
#35. In many ways, the system of government, taxation and military organization developed by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the envy of Western Europe.
Noel Malcolm
#37. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#38. Over-taxation cost England her colonies of North America.
Edmund Burke
#39. More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.
Winston Churchill
#40. Government spending is taxation. When you look at this, I've never heard of a poor person spending himself into prosperity; let alone I've never heard of a poor person taxing himself into prosperity.
Arthur Laffer
#41. No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil
Calvin Coolidge
#42. National Health? Socialized pension funds? State-controlled television? Search and seizure laws? Forfeiture laws? If we're not living in the Soviet Union of the United States we certainly have returned to 1776 and 'taxation without representation.'
Michael Moriarty
#43. An expropriating property protector (the state, through taxation) is a contradiction in terms
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#44. Yeah, I am in favor of migration. But I am also in favor of education. But at the same time, I am in favor of progressive taxation. I think we need all of this. I think we don't have to choose one.
Thomas Piketty
#45. Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are
a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.
Ha-Joon Chang
#46. I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.
Warren G. Harding
#47. My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.
Merton Miller
#48. Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.
Andrew Jackson
#49. Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased - not a reduced - flow of revenues to the federal government.
John F. Kennedy
#50. I refuse to believe that the only reason we are here is to pay taxes and die.
Seth Adam Smith
#51. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
Ayn Rand
#52. There are always principles to be depended upon in this matter of taxation ... Amidst the inconsistent, the bewildering representations offered, a certain number must be in accordance with true principles ...
Harriet Martineau
#53. A general principle of good taxation is that similar jobs, and similar kinds of compensation, should be taxed the same way: otherwise, the government is effectively subsidizing some jobs over others.
James Surowiecki
#54. It is not the role of government to use the taxation and welfare system as a tool to level the playing field.
Joe Hockey
#56. A person who says "every person has a right to a decent education" may not actually mean "people should be robbed to support bad schools" or "all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.
Jeffrey Tucker
#57. Taxation is not charity. It is not voluntary. As we shrink the state and make government smaller, we will find that more and more people are able to take care of themselves.
Grover Norquist
#58. The institution of taxation rests foursquare on the axiom that somebody must rule somebody else.
Frank Chodorov
#59. What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
Thomas Paine
#60. The surest way for a poor nation to stay poor is to harass, hobble, and straitjacket private enterprise or to discourage or destroy it by subsidized government competition, oppressive taxation, or outright expropriation.
Henry Hazlitt
#61. In retrospect, I now believe this expected donation of ten percent of income to the Fellowship was based on bad exegesis of an old Jewish taxation law that Jesus Himself seemed to completely ignore.
Dylan Morrison
#62. 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.
Thomas Paine
#63. So far as the object of taxation is to raise a revenue for discharging the debts and defraying the expenses of the community, its operation should be adapted as much as possible to suit the burden with equal hand upon all in proportion with their ability of bearing it without oppression.
John Quincy Adams
#64. Taxation has its limitations as a method of achieving better economic distribution since for this purpose it is essentially remedial. We must also take a positive approach by finding new ways to spread ownership of future capital growth more broadly in our society.
John D. Rockefeller
#65. The cultivation of a single staple grain was, in itself, an important step in legibility and hence, appropriation. Monoculture fosters uniformity at many different levels. . .A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.
James C. Scott
#66. For every dollar that is spent on the (boondoggle) bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000, 000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.
Henry Hazlitt
#67. Democratic nation states remain far more capable of managing the circuit of coercion, taxation and legitimation than any transnational bodies.
Geoff Mulgan
#68. Liberal redistributionists in favor of heavy taxation place less weight on incentive than do small-government conservatives.
Edmund Phelps
#69. I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.
Mark Twain
#70. There can be no such thing as 'fairness in taxation.' Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a 'fair tax' is therefore every bit as absurd as that of 'fair theft.'
Murray Rothbard
#71. He who has the base necessities of life should pay nothing; taxation on him who has a surplus may, if need be; extend to everything beyond necessities.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#72. The road to recovery is to stimulate small business and innovation by reducing taxation, regulation, and litigation.
Sandy Adams
#73. Yes I pay taxes ... There are no ethics in the face of coercion, that is blaming the victim. Focus on the man with the gun, not the man in the crosshairs trying to survive.
Stefan Molyneux
#75. An education system where student selection is based on credit capacity and not merit capacity and where graduating students are no longer indebted to the nation, but increasingly indebted to the Australian Taxation Office - that's no way to improve the quality of education.
Gough Whitlam
#76. By operating independently of government aid, the churches ... avoid the resentment of those who do not want to be forced to contribute to churches to which they do not belong and of their own members who do not welcome being forced to contribute through government taxation.
John M Swomley
#77. Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?
Edward St. Aubyn
#78. Even if you assume that the whole economy would work better had we never had double taxation, having the envy and resentment of the richest paying low or no taxes screams of injustice. You have to have a fair system.
Charlie Munger
#79. Taxes are indeed very heavy -
We are taxed twice as much by our Idleness.
Three times as much by our Pride.
And four times as much by our Folly.
Benjamin Franklin
#80. Undoubtedly Internet has reduced the possibilities of taxation. Why should I buy something here if I can buy it from a company in Japan or England or Brazil with a lower tax?
Milton Friedman
#81. When land and its tillage are the basis of taxation, one need not care exactly how many people there are.
Ian Hacking
#82. What's the best way to make sure that the poor have a share in a country's growing wealth: Regulation? Taxes? Philanthropy?
Linsey McGoey
#83. Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking - a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations.
George Will
#84. Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
Bernard Berenson
#85. The ceiling on taxation of capital gains reflects the national belief that speculation is a more worthwhile way to make a living than work.
Calvin Trillin
#86. You can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak
Abraham Lincoln
#87. Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list
the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.
Karl Marx
#88. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.
Will Rogers
#89. Excessive taxation ... will carry reason & reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.
Thomas Jefferson
#90. It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#91. We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests.
James Montgomery
#92. The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and '20s.
Thomas Piketty
#93. I've been told that some members of Congress disagree with my tax cut proposal. Well, you know it's been said that taxation is the art of plucking feathers without killing the bird. It's time they realized the bird just doesn't have any feathers left.
Ronald Reagan
#94. The United States has already passed on as the world's economic leader. Having flouted Thomas Jefferson for too long, America has succumbed to public debt, the 'fore horse for oppression and despotism,' after which 'taxation will follow, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
Ilana Mercer
#95. High taxation was not regarded in these years as an affront. On the contrary, steep rates of progressive income tax were seen as a consensual device to take excess resources away from the privileged
Tony Judt
#96. Economy is the first and great article (economy such as I understand it) in my financial creed. The controversy between direct and indirect taxation holds a minor, though important place.
William E. Gladstone
#97. Government can wreck a business by confiscating its money by taxation.
Owen Paterson
#98. It is a singular advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end purposed - that is, an extension of the revenue.
Alexander Hamilton
#99. Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
Henry George
#100. I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.
Mark Twain
