"Taxation: how the sheep are shorn."

Edward Abbey

"Throughout most of American history, taxes were levied principally on consumption, rather than income. Except during the Civil War, the federal government was financed almost entirely by import duties and excise taxes until 1913, when our current income taxwas imposed. The Founding Fathers favored consumption taxes in part because they are harder to raise to confiscatory levels than incomes taxes. ... Experience shows that general sales tax rates much above 10 percent are very hard to collect. They encourage smuggling, black markets, evasion, production for personal use, substitution for untaxed commodities and other activities that erode the tax base. Thus, confining taxation to a form that is inherently hard to raise to excessive levels meant that the size of government would be severely limited."

Bruce Bartlett


HOUSELESS, (adj.) -- having paid all taxes on household goods

Ambrose Bierce

"One man's larceny is another's just distribution of goods."

Robert Bork

"Taxes are not just about money. Every tax represents a transfer of power and freedom from the people to the government. The underlying premise of every tax is that the money will do more good in the hands of government than in the hands of the people who earned it."

Linda Bowles

"The point to remember is what government gives it must first take away."

John S. Caldwell
 
"Whatever amount is taken from the community in the form of taxes, if not lost, goes to 
them in the shape of expenditures or disbursements. The two - disbursements and taxation - 
constitute the fiscal action of the government...
  
Such being the case, it must necessarily follow that some one portion of the community 
must pay in taxes more than it receives back in disbursements, while another receives in 
disbursements  more than it pays in taxes. It is, then, manifest, taking the whole process 
together, that taxes must be, in effect, bounties to that portion of the community which 
receives more in disbursements than it pays in taxes, while to the other which pays in 
taxes more than it receives in disbursements they are taxes in reality - burdens instead 
of bounties.  This consequence is unavoidable. It results from the nature of the process, 
be the taxes ever so equally laid...
  
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide 
the community into two great classes: one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the 
taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the 
other, of those who are recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, 
in fact, supported by the government; or in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and 
tax-consumers."    
 
John C. Calhoun

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."

Winston Churchill (1903)

"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. .. I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."

President Grover Cleveland

"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."

Calvin Coolidge

"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder."

Benjamin Disraeli

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."

Albert Einstein

"It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part."

Benjamin Franklin

"Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

Benjamin Franklin

"...(W)ith the adoption of the income-tax amendment in 1913, the amount of money people retained as their own became totally subject to the will of the government.  Congress might set the percentage high or low, but that wasn't really the point.  The point was that by granting public officials the unfettered power to determine the percentage of income tax, government became the determiner of how much of their income people would be permitted to keep. The Sixteenth Amendment effectively nationalized people's income and placed them on a government allowance."

Jacob G. Hornberger

"If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people in England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."

Thomas Jefferson

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. .. A wise and frugal government ... shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. ... Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare but only those specifically enumerated. ... Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands?"

Thomas Jefferson

"Excise, n.  A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom the excise is paid."

Samuel Johnson

"A {tax loophole is} something that benefits the other guy.  If it benefits you, it is tax reform."

Russell B. Long

"The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets. ... A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species. ... Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own."

James Madison

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...."

James Madison

"That the power to tax involves the power to destroy ... is not to be denied."

John Marshall

"Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are 'economically untenable' and that they advocated them only because 'they necessitate further inroads' upon the capitalist system and are 'unavoidable' as a means of bringing about socialism."

Ludwig von Mises

"The tired argument that the estate tax only affects the rich is simply false.  ...[F]armers, ranchers, and small business owners ... are hardly rich, but some of them have built up valuable businesses they would like to pass on to their children. Yet when they die, their children rarely have the liquid cash needed to pay the death tax bill.  Often the business must be sold or divided to raise money for the IRS.  Many family farms across this country have been bought by large corporations because of the estate tax.  Ultimately, the argument against the death tax is a moral one.  People should not be punished for working hard, saving, and building wealth.  Our society should respect the most basic property right, namely the right to dispose of one's property as one wishes.  The American dream is based on making a better life for one's children, despite the empty rhetoric of the class-warfare politicians in Washington.  Building wealth is not sinister, it is admirable.  Our tax rules should encourage the decidedly American virtue of saving for the future."

Rep. Ron Paul

"The only legitimate purpose of our tax system is to raise revenues needed to run the government. It's not the government's job to determine how you should use your money."

Rep. Ron Paul

"I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity, [such spending] would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."

President Franklin Pierce

"When there is an income tax, the just will pay more and the unjust less."

Plato

"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business ...frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite."

Ronald Reagan

"Congress seems to want to cure every ill known to man except unconstitutional government and high taxes."

Charley Reese
"You don't pay taxes - they take taxes."

Chris Rock

"The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."

Will Rogers

"Tax time approaches, and Americans are as always paying H & R Block billions to help them save some of their wealth from their ravenous government. Pitiful, in a way: it underlines the grim but unacknowledged fact that the government is their enemy and they have to hire protection from it. But don't we enjoy 'self-government'? Well, if we have it, I'd hardly say we enjoy it. True, we aren't being taxed by the monarch of Great Britain, but our American-born rulers claim far more of our wealth than the British monarchs ever did."

Joseph Sobran

"Chattel slavery in this country was abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. But tax slavery was instituted in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave the federal government limitless power to tax incomes. That is the chief reason most of us now work nearly half the year just to pay taxes."

Joseph Sobran

"If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end.  This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects."

Henry David Thoreau
"Democrats raise taxes. It's their way of paying for programs that buy votes from people who don't pay high taxes."

 Pete Waldmeir
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