var quote = new Array();
quote[0] = "I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.
Douglas Adams";
quote[1] = "Distinctions which originated under a feudal economy when land dominated social relations are peculiarly irrelevant in the application of tax measures now so largely directed toward intangible wealth.
Felix Frankfurter";
quote[2] = "The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.
Denis Healey";
quote[3] = "Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken ";
quote[4] = "The Salary Axiom:
The pay raise is just large enough to increase your taxes and just small enough to have no effect on your take-home pay.";
quote[5] = "In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.
Voltaire";
quote[6] = "For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
Eric Ambler";
quote[7] = "Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.
From a Washington Post word contest";
quote[8] = "It is seldom given to mortal man to feel superior to a tax lawyer.
Anthony C. Amsterdam ";
quote[9] = "If a United States Supreme Court Justice is in the doghouse with the Chief Justice, he gets the crud. He gets the tax cases.
Harry Blackmun ";
quote[10] = "Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten.
Lord Bramwell ";
quote[11] = "To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.
Edmund Burke ";
quote[12] = "The validity of a tax depends upon its nature, and not upon its name.
Benjamin N. Cardozo";
quote[13] = "If any person shall complain in court that payment has been unduly exacted of him or that he has sustained any arrogance and if he should be able to prove this fact, a severe sentence shall be pronounced against such tax collector.
Constantine";
quote[14] = "This (preparing my tax return) is too difficult for a mathematician. It takes a philosopher.
Albert Einstein ";
quote[15] = "But in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin ";
quote[16] = "A society which turns so many of its best and brightest into tax lawyers may be doing something wrong.
Hoffman F. Fuller";
quote[17] = "The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.
Barry M. Goldwater ";
quote[18] = "It's a game. We (tax lawyers) teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich-- and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.
John Grisham";
quote[19] = "We have long had death and taxes as the two standards of inevitability. But there are those who believe that death is the preferable of the two. "At least," as one man said, "there's one advantage about death; it doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
Erwin N. Griswold";
quote[20] = "It is fairer to tax people on what they extract from the economy, as roughly measured by their consumption, than to tax them on what they produce for the economy, as roughly measured by their income.
Thomas Hobbes ";
quote[21] = "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.
Oliver Wendell Holmes ";
quote[22] = "Taxes are what we pay for civilised society. A penalty on the other hand is intended altogether to prevent the thing punished.
Oliver Wendell Holmes";
quote[23] = "It would be an extreme if not an extravagant application of the Fifth Amendment to say that it authorized a man to refuse to state the amount of his income because it had been made in crime.
Oliver Wendell Holmes ";
quote[24] = "Taxes cannot be escaped by anticipatory arrangements and contracts however skilfully devised by which the fruits are attributed to a different tree from that on which they grew.
Oliver Wendell Holmes ";
quote[25] = "Due process requires some definite link, some minimum connection, between a state and the person, property or transaction it seeks to tax.
Robert H. Jackson ";
quote[26] = "The avoidance of taxes is the only pursuit that still carries any reward.
J. M. Keynes ";
quote[27] = "Don't tax you, don't tax me; Tax the fellow behind the tree.
Russell B. Long ";
quote[28] = "A tax loophole is something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform.
Russell B. Long";
quote[29] = "For if you love those who love you, what reward can you have? Do not even the tax collectors do that?
Matthew 5:46 ";
quote[30] = "There are two distinct classes of men...those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.
Thomas Paine ";
quote[31] = "War involves in; its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.
Thomas Paine ";
quote[32] = "A taxpayer is someone who works for the federal government, but who doesn't have to take a civil service examination.
Ronald Reagan ";
quote[33] = "The trick is to stop thinking of it as "your" money.
Revenue Auditor";
quote[34] = "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 ";
quote[35] = "The Government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw ";
quote[36] = "There is no art which one government sooner learns from another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith";
quote[37] = "What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
Mark Twain";
quote[38] = "In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.
Voltaire ";
quote[39] = "An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, the power to destroy.
Daniel Webster";
quote[40] = "The fact that the incidences of income taxation may have been taken into account by arranging matters one way rather than another, so long as the way chosen was the way the law allows, does not make a transaction something else than it truly is.
Felix Frankfurter";
quote[41] = "Indoors or out, no one relaxes in March, that month of wind and taxes. The wind will presently disappear, the taxes last us all the year.
Ogden Nash ";
quote[42] = "This is the season of the year when we discover that we owe most of our success to Uncle Sam.
The Wall Street Journal ";
quote[43] = "I believe we should all pay our tax bill with a smile. I tried but they wanted cash.
Anonymous ";
quote[44] = "It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.
Dave Barry ";
quote[45] = "Your tax return has just arrived, and all of us applaud it. The only question to decide is who will get to audit it.
New York magazine";
quote[46] = "There's nothing wrong with the younger generation that becoming taxpayers won't cure.
Dan Bennett ";
quote[47] = "Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation.
Fletcher Knebel ";
quote[48] = "Excessive taxation will carry reason and reflection to every man's door, and particularly in the hour of election.
Thomas Jefferson ";
quote[49] = "The politician's promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.
W.L. Mackenzie King ";
quote[50] = "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
Jean B. Colbert ";
quote[51] = "Count the day won, when, turning on its axis, this Earth imposes no additional taxes.
Franklin Pierce Adams";
quote[52] = "I do not want you ever to initiate any action for any refunds of taxes without first consulting me and presenting the matter fully to me so that I may judge whether it is an honourable and ethical action to take, not simply legally, but according to my own personal standards.
Ernest Hemingway";
quote[53] = "To tax and to please is not given to me, but to tax and be fair is.
N. A. Palkhivala ";
quote[54] = "Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Herman Wouk";
quote[55] = "Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow";
quote[56] = "Of all debts, men are least willing to pay taxes. What a satire is this on government!
Ralph Waldo Emerson "Politics," 1844";
quote[57] = "I am taxed on my income. This is perfectly gorgeous. I never felt so important in my life.
Mark Twain responding to a 1864 tax bill ";
quote[58] = "A dog who thinks he is a man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.
Fran Lebowitz ";
quote[59] = "I am proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is - I could be just as proud for half the money.
Arthur Godfrey";
quote[60] = "There's only one kind of tax that would please everybody -- one that nobody but the other guy has to pay.
Earl Wilson ";
quote[61] = "I have something my tax doctor calls 'narcotaxis.' Within 20 seconds of hearing someone launch into an explanation of tax laws, my eyes become glassy, my body loses all feeling, and I go into a shallow coma.
Russell Baker ";
quote[62] = "Ideas of fairness in taxation are usually nebulous.
Roy Blough and Carl Shoup";
quote[63] = "It's completely unrealistic to view business as out to avoid taxes.
Kendall Houghton ";
quote[64] = "Loophole: To liberals, any provision of the tax code that fails to claim money earned, inherited, saved, or otherwise pocketed by known taxpayers.
The Conservative's Dictionary ";
quote[65] = "The chief deduction most people make from their income tax is that government costs too darned much.
Walt Streightiff ";
quote[66] = "When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise 'em. That's statesmanship of the highest order.
Will Rogers ";
quote[67] = "In the end, when you're dealing with tax laws, the pigs get fatter and the hogs get slaughtered.
Gene Gavin";
quote[68] = "The invention of the teenage was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes -- naturally, nobody wants to live any other way.
Judith Martin";
quote[69] = "Death and taxes are both certain . . . But death isn't annual.
Anonymous";
quote[70] = "Justice: A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes, and personal service.
Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary";
quote[71] = "My uncle claims that if he files his income tax wrong he'll go to jail, and if he files it right he'll go to the poor house.
Nonnee Coan";
quote[72] = "Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
Robert Heinlein";
quote[73] = "Calculation has convinced me that circumstances may arise and probably will arise wherein all the resources of taxation will be necessary for the safety of the state.
Thomas Jefferson ";
quote[74] = "I have trouble reconciling my net income with my gross habits.
Errol Flynn";
quote[75] = "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";
quote[76] = "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.
President William McKinley's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897";
quote[77] = "Your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level by taxation. Your income will be subject to higher taxes. Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year after payment of taxes.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Radio Broadcast, April 28, 1942 (Referring to Seven-Point Program) ";
quote[78] = "Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organisation that never pays a nickel in taxes.
Dave Barry ";
quote[79] = "To err is human, but this you should learn. Do not be human on your tax return.
Anonymous";
quote[80] = "Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.
William Cobbett";
quote[81] = "You're acting like a thing from another tax bracket!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer ";
quote[82] = "It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them.
Tiberius Caesar";
quote[83] = "No statesman ever will find it worth his pains to tax our labours and excise our brains.
Charles Churchill ";
quote[84] = "Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down.
Charles Adams ";
quote[85] = "The current income tax code is the chief source of political corruption in the nation's capitol.
Rep. Richard K. Armey";
quote[86] = "The IRS has had substantial success in Chicago. Al Capone was convicted on tax evasion here, and that was probably the last time a majority of Americans applauded the IRS on anything.
Sheldon L. Banoff";
quote[87] = "Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.
Dave Barry ";
quote[88] = "Unless we wish to hamper the people in their right to earn a living, we must have tax reform.
President Calvin Coolidge ";
quote[89] = "Tax policy wonks, to use the Clintonese appellation, call this 'buying the base.' Normal people call it 'throwing money away.'
Michael Graetz on the practice of using tax incentives to encourage employers to provide health insurance.";
quote[90] = "It's like spending all your money on a party before making the down payment on your house.
William Gale on the problems he believes would be posed by cutting taxes before enacting tax reform ";
quote[91] = "The only people helped by the death tax are lawyers, accountants, and IRS agents.
Rep. Bob Schaffer";
quote[92] = "Contrary to what some people claim, the tax laws have a lot of respect for logic. They use it so sparingly.
Jeffrey L. Yablon ";
quote[93] = "The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalised larceny.
President Calvin Coolidge ";
quote[94] = "Unless waste and ostentation in government spending are avoided or eschewed, no amount of moral sermons would change people's attitude to tax avoidance.
Sabyasachi Mukharji";
quote[95] = "Tax, unfortunately, cannot explain everything.
Calvin Johnson ";
quote[96] = "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.
Alexander Hamilton ";
quote[97] = "The tax bill dies many deaths along the way, and I'm not sure it shouldn't have died all the way.
Sen. Lloyd Bentsen";
quote[98] = "We do not have, and never had, and could not have a 'voluntary' tax system.
Donald C. Alexander";
quote[99] = "The reality is that for the last quarter century, Congress and the presidents have betrayed us by concocting tax laws that are insincere, unfair, and convoluted. We're just learning that when it comes to taxes, Washington speaks with an accomplished forked tongue.
Martin L. Gross";
quote[100] = "All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided that you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: 'Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?'
Dave Barry ";
quote[101] = "Whenever taxes become burdensome, a remedy can be applied by the people; but if they do not act for themselves, no one can be very successful in acting for them.
President Calvin Coolidge";
quote[102] = "Internal Revenue Service: The world's most successful mail order business.
Bob Goddard";
quote[103] = "The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.
Gore Vidal";
quote[104] = "Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed.
Art Buchwald";
quote[105] = "Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory.
Thomas Jefferson";
quote[106] = "The United States is the only country where it takes more brains to figure your tax than to earn the money to pay it.
Edward J. Gurney ";
quote[107] = "Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.
Charles F. Kettering ";
quote[108] = "He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination-- and taxes.
H. E. Martz ";
quote[109] = "No man's property is safe while Congress is in session.
Mark Twain";
quote[110] = "Death and taxes and childbirth. There's never any convenient time for any of them.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind)";
quote[111] = "Income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.
Will Rogers ";
quote[112] = "I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
George Bernard Shaw ";
quote[113] = "The trouble with an income-tax reduction is that it will stimulate business just enough to put everybody in a higher tax bracket.
Harold Coffin";
quote[114] = "It is the settled policy of the government . To avoid, for the most part, every form of direct taxation, except in time of war.
President William McKinley ";
quote[115] = "American tax laws are constantly changing as our elected representatives seek new ways to ensure that whatever tax advice we receive is incorrect.
Dave Barry ";
quote[116] = "Whether or not it takes a village to raise a child, it seems to take a village these days to plan one rich person's taxes.
Lee A. Sheppard ";
quote[117] = "Don't tax you. Don't tax me. Tax the companies across the sea.
Dan Rostenkowski";
quote[118] = "The tax code is the single greatest source of lobbying activity in Washington.
Rep. Richard K. Armey";
quote[119] = "The death tax is wrong, plain wrong. It comes at the wrong time and hurts the wrong people.
Rep. Bob Schaffer";
quote[120] = "Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman ";
quote[121] = "I didn't report the 1994 and 1995 payments as interest income on my tax return because the payments were intended to compensate me for my cost of funds in extending the loan, and were not intended as interest payments.
Chng Gim Huat v Public Prosecutor, High Ct. of Singapore 5 July 2000";
quote[122] = "Any reasonable system of taxation would be based on the slogan 'Soak the Rich.'
Heywood Broun ";
quote[123] = "The income tax people are very nice. They're letting me keep my own mother.
Henny Youngman ";
quote[124] = "There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.
Anonymous";
quote[125] = "Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Oscar Wilde";
quote[126] = "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.
Thomas Jefferson";
quote[127] = "The new technologies should not be used as justification to create new taxes.
Glen A. Kohl ";
quote[128] = "Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.
F. J. Raymond";
quote[129] = "As a citizen, you have an obligation to the country's tax system, but you also have an obligation to yourself to know your rights under the law.
Donald C. Alexander ";
quote[130] = "To the extent that some people are dishonest or careless in their dealings with the government, the majority is forced to carry a heavier tax burden.
John F. Kennedy ";
quote[131] = "Trying to control tax shelters is like stepping on Jell-O. It just squeezes out between your toes and the mess is worse than when you began.
Anonymous Congressional Staff Member ";
quote[132] = "Last year I had difficulty with my income tax. I tried to take my analyst off as a business deduction. The Government said it was entertainment. We compromised finally and made it a religious contribution.
Woody Allen ";
quote[133] = "Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.
Anonymous";
quote[134] = "Old MacDonald had an agricultural real estate tax abatement.
Anonymous";
quote[135] = "Tax reform is ultimately a decision about values.
Bill Bradley";
quote[136] = "Tariff: A scale of taxes on imports designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary";
quote[137] = "A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.
Anonymous";
quote[138] = "Today's American works half of every day to pay for the burden of government. His taxes are used to reward the lazy and the immoral.
Ellen R. Sauerbrey ";
quote[139] = "The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Arthur C. Clarke";
quote[140] = "We've got so much taxation. I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed except the answer to prayer.
Anonymous";
quote[141] = "I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it.
Mark Twain ";
quote[142] = "We cannot lose sight of the fact that complexity is the result of our struggle for fairness.
Margaret Milner Richardson ";
quote[143] = "When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the state demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax.'
Jeff Daiell";
quote[144] = "Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light.
Sydney Smith ";
quote[145] = "When the same man, or set of men, holds the sword and the purse, there is an end of liberty.
George Mason";
quote[146] = "When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.
H. L. Mencken ";
quote[147] = "There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
Albert Jay Nock ";
quote[148] = "Where there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
Plato";
quote[149] = "The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring over his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.
Sydney Smith";
quote[150] = "Nuclear physics is much easier than tax law. It's rational and always works the same way.
Jerold Rochwald";
quote[151] = "All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.
Alan Greenspan ";
quote[152] = "All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.
Walter B. Wriston";
quote[153] = "The ideologists of taxation are constantly attributing their own preference to some higher disinterested wisdom.
Louis Eisenstein";
quote[154] = "The wisdom of man never yet contrived a system of taxation that would operate with perfect equality.
Andrew Jackson";
quote[155] = "Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems.
Romana Machado";
quote[156] = "Revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid cheerfully by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts.
Thomas Jefferson";
quote[157] = "In one sense, the tax structure is art - a subsuming of the infinite muddle of human activity under a single rubric, as though it had a single purpose and could be ordered by a mind heaving the line of a single vision.
John Casey";
quote[158] = "When Congress talks about simplification, taxpayers may well be reminded of Emerson's comments regarding an acquaintance, 'the louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons'.
Michael J. Graetz";
quote[159] = "Taxation, in reality, is life. If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.
Sheldon S. Cohen";
quote[160] = "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 ";
quote[161] = "Tax law jurisprudence is a field beset with invisible boomerangs.
Robert H. Jackson ";
quote[162] = "You must pay taxes. But there's no law that says you gotta leave a tip.
Morgan Stanley Advertisement";
quote[163] = "Pothinus: Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?
Caesar: My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.
George Bernard Shaw (Caesar and Cleopatra)";
quote[164] = "What is one really trying to do in the investment world? Not pay the least taxes, although that may be a factor to be considered in achieving the end. Means and end should not be confused, however, and the end is to come away with the largest after-tax rate of compound.
Warren Buffett";
quote[165] = "It is not the heavily taxed realm which executes great deeds but the moderately taxed one.
Old Asian Proverb ";
quote[166] = "Neither will it be that a people over-laid with taxes should ever become valiant. No people over-charged with tribute is fit for empire.
Francis Bacon ";
quote[167] = "If you get up early, work late, and pay your taxes, you will get ahead - if you strike oil.
J. Paul Getty ";
quote[168] = "A person doesn't know how much he has to be thankful for until he has to pay taxes on it.
Ann Landers ";
quote[169] = "The capital-gains tax has created more millionaires than any other government policy. The capital-gains tax tends to make investors hold longer. That is almost always the right decision.
Chris Davis";
quote[170] = "Capital punishment: The income tax.
Jeff Hayes";
quote[171] = "A fool and his money are soon parted. It takes creative tax laws for the rest.
Bob Thaves";
quote[172] = "You have to be oblivious to common sense to believe that taxing people who do work and paying people who don't work results in more people working. That's just not the way the world works.
Arthur B. Laffer ";
quote[173] = "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street.
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat.
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.
Taxman! Well, I'm the taxman. Yeah, I'm the taxman.
The Beatles ("Taxman")";
quote[174] = "I love America, but I can't spend the whole year here. I can't afford the taxes.
Mick Jagger ";
quote[175] = "Whoever hopes a faultless tax to see, hopes what ne'er was, is not, and ne'er shall be.
Alexander Pope";
quote[176] = "Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
Calvin Coolidge";
quote[177] = "Every time this country has cut tax rates across the board, revenues went up and the economy grew.
Jack Kemp";
quote[178] = "Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labours. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, tax-sold farms and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain.
Franklin D. Roosevelt ";
quote[179] = "All taxation, however disguised, is a loss per se. It is the duty, and the sacred duty, of Government to take only from the people what is necessary to the proper discharge of the public service; and that taxation in any other mode is simply in one shape or another, legalised robbery.
Richard Cartwright";
quote[180] = "We understandably hesitate to talk about law in explicitly moral terms. But tax has unavoidable moral and political dimensions.
Edward J. McCaffery";
quote[181] = "Friends and neighbours complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. 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 ";
quote[182] = "Every society makes choices as to the tax systems that not only raise the necessary revenues to support government expenditures, but within that choice are inherent reflections of societal values. Not only does a society choose a tax system but the tax system becomes one of the basic institutions that in itself shapes and moulds the society.
Karen M. Yeager";
quote[183] = "Men in America were so conditioned that they felt differently about taxes and about prices. The former was an involuntary taking; the latter a voluntary giving. No one observed the obvious fact that in terms of total income of an individual it made no difference whether his money went for prices or taxes.
Thurman W. Arnold";
quote[184] = "What are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of glory: - Taxes upon every article which enters the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under foot . . . taxes on everything on earth and the waters under the earth.
Sidney Smith";
quote[185] = "If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it.
Old Economic Adage ";
quote[186] = "Tax pollution - not people.
Gerry E. Studds";
quote[187] = "Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? - "he got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much." Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson";
quote[188] = "Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.
Franklin D. Roosevelt";
quote[189] = "The power to tax the exercise of a privilege is the power to control or suppress its enjoyment.
William O. Douglas ";
quote[190] = "Crime had to be committed before liability for the imposition (of disputed levy on illegal liquor) arose. Taxes are not so conditioned.
Pierce Butler ";
quote[191] = "A sales tax is a tax on the freedom of purchase.
Felix Frankfurter ";
quote[192] = "The sales tax seems to be more politically acceptable than the income tax.
Raymond C. Scheppach";
quote[193] = "Borrowing imposes a hidden burden upon taxpayers in the short run and an explicit burden in the long run, while taxes impose an explicit short-run burden and a more hidden burden in the long run.
Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway";
quote[194] = "There is no abstract justice in any system of taxation.
Owen J. Roberts ";
quote[195] = "The law of taxation is more concerned with the substance of economic opportunity than with classifying legal concepts, and tagging them with names and labels.
Benjamin N. Cardozo";
quote[196] = "When King Philip of France expelled the Jews in 1306, the reason given was that they charged excessively high interest rates. However, he did not cancel the debts owed to Jews, but instead set about collecting them for his own treasury. To his disappointment, the king discovered that the money collected in this way was less than the taxes that Jews had been paying.
Thomas Sowell";
quote[197] = "Trade being a sensitive plant, a direct tax upon it to some extent at least deters trade even if its effect is not precisely calculable.
Felix Frankfurter ";
quote[198] = "The payment of taxes gives a right to protection.
James M. Wayne ";
quote[199] = "Tax liability is one of the notorious incidents of social life.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.";
quote[200] = "Those who can do a good trade don't wrangle over taxes.
Old Chinese Proverb";
quote[201] = "Has the tyrant not also another object which is that the people may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?
Plato";
quote[202] = "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 people's power to pay and continued to pile up deficits, then it is on the road to bankruptcy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt";
quote[203] = "It was as true as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them.
Charles Dickens";
quote[204] = "Taxes are the lifeblood of government and no taxpayer should be permitted to escape the payment of his just share of the burden of contributing thereto.
Arthur T. Vanderbilt";
quote[205] = "The expenses of government, having for their object the interest of all, should be borne by everyone, and the more a man enjoys the advantages of society, the more he ought to hold himself honoured in contributing to those expenses.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot";
quote[206] = "Taxes send messages, and in several ways. They affect the costs and returns to different kinds of activity, thereby influencing patterns of use of capital and labor. They also make statements about the relative desirability of different types of activity and patterns of conduct. Conduct that carries a low tax induces people to emulate that conduct. Conduct that carries a high tax discourages such conduct.
Edward J. McCaffery and Richard E. Wagner";
quote[207] = "The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
Paula Poundstone ";
quote[208] = "Cursed war and racking tax have left us scarcely raiment to our backs.
Sir Walter Scott";
quote[209] = "There is an ancient belief that the gods love the obscure and hate the obvious. Without benefit of divinity, modern men of similar persuasion draft provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 341 is their triumph.
Martin D. Ginsburg";
quote[210] = "Legislative changes in tax policy usually begin as marginal adjustments to the existing tax structure. . . . The tax code offers a variety of easily grasped levers. In this sense, it is an incrementalist paradise, susceptible and seductive to political tinkerers. As a result, most changes in tax bills consist of simple adjustments in existing tax provisions.
John F. Witte ";
quote[211] = "The most damaging thing you can do to any businessman in America is to keep him in doubt, and to keep him guessing, on what our tax policy is.
Lyndon B. Johnson ";
quote[212] = "Some uncertainty in the tax laws may be useful in discouraging taxpayers from venturing too close to the edge, and thereby going over the edge, of established principles.
Don Lubick";
quote[213] = "If we don't do something to simplify the tax system, we're going to end up with a national police force of internal revenue agents.
Leon Panetta";
quote[214] = "The corporate income tax is one of the best examples in American political history of the law of unintended consequences. It was originally intended as a means to tax the rich, but it quickly became one of the prime means by which the rich have avoided taxes.
John Steele Gordon";
quote[215] = "The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night.
Otto von Bismarck";
quote[216] = "In a reversal of "No taxation without representation," women were required to pay federal income tax seven years before they won the right to vote.
Loch Adamson";
quote[217] = "Complexity does not enter the tax code so much out of malevolence as through misguided reform efforts and excessive demands made on tax laws as the vehicle for implementing public policy.
Sheldon D. Pollack";
quote[218] = "Almost every time we pass a tax bill, we make the code more complex, increase the burden on the taxpayer, and make it harder to enforce.
Trent Lott ";
quote[219] = "The political function of the individual and corporate income taxes, which is served by their being complex, is to provide a means whereby the members of Congress who have anything whatsoever to do with taxation can raise campaign funds. That is what supports the army of lobbyists in Washington who are seeking to produce changes in the income tax, to introduce special privileges or exemptions for their clients, or to have what they regard as special burdens on their clients removed. A flat tax would thwart those objectives since the structure of the tax is so simple and straightforward.
Milton Friedman ";
quote[220] = "In the tax law, complexity stems from rapacity taking cover in obscurity.
J. Mark Iwry";
quote[221] = "The purse of the people is the real seat of sensibility. Let it be drawn upon largely, and they will then listen to truths which could not excite them through any other organ.
Thomas Jefferson ";
quote[222] = "I'm not for increasing taxes to increase spending on anything no matter how meritorious it is. It's a bad precedent.
Phil Gramm";
quote[223] = "There is a constant cry and a natural desire for a "simple" income tax law. America can have a simple income tax law anytime it wants it. It would not be especially difficult to draft. . . . The trouble is you wouldn't want that law. You wouldn't stand for it. Americans would not tolerate any "simple" income tax law. Why? The reason is simple. Any "simple" income tax law would take a "meat axe" approach. It would be outrageously discriminatory. It would be grossly inequitable and unfair to a lot of people.
Laurens Williams";
quote[224] = "Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.
Max Baucus ";
quote[225] = "The complexity of our tax code in the main is not there because of some mischief. Most of it is there in the effort to do more perfect justice.
Russell B. Long";
quote[226] = "Tax law requires that the intended transactions have economic substance separate and distinct from economic benefit achieved solely by tax reduction.
David Laro";
quote[227] = "Taxation in most communities is a long way off from a logical and coherent theory.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.";
quote[228] = "The soundest principles of republicanism do sanction some relation between representation and taxation. The two ought to be connected. This was the principle of the revolution.
John Marshall";
quote[229] = "I guess you will have to go to jail. If that is the result of not understanding the Income Tax Law I will meet you there. We shall have a merry, merry time for all our friends will be there. It will be an intellectual center, for no one understands the Income Tax Law except persons who have not sufficient intelligence to understand the questions that arise under it.
Elihu Root";
quote[230] = "The income tax laws do not profess to embody perfect economic theory.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.";
quote[231] = "Liberals have practiced "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect" but conservatives have perfected "borrow and borrow, spend and spend, elect and elect."
George Will ";
quote[232] = "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 ";
quote[233] = "A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Alexis De Tocqueville ";
quote[234] = "To extinguish a Debt which exists and to avoid contracting more are ideas almost always favored by public feeling and opinion; but to pay Taxes for the one or the other purpose, which are the only means of avoiding the evil, is always more or less unpopular. These contradictions are in human nature.
Alexander Hamilton";
quote[235] = "What an increase of rent is to the farmers, an increase of taxation is to the public . . . so long as it is confined within moderate limits, it acts as a powerful stimulus to industry and economy, and most commonly occasions the production of more wealth than it abstracts.
J.R. McCulloch ";
quote[236] = "There is a prevailing maxim among some reasoners, That every new tax creates a new ability in the subject to bear it, and that each increase of public burdens increases proportionably the industry of the people.
David Hume";
quote[237] = "Why should the federal government tax the consumption of red wine, while it does not tax cola drinks, particularly in light of empirical evidence that suggests that moderate wine drinking is actually beneficial?
Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway ";
quote[238] = "All taxes discourage something. Why not discourage bad things like pollution rather than good things like working or investment?
Lawrence Summers";
quote[239] = "The design of a tax system, including the extent to which it confers avoidance power, reflects the values of its designers. Tax systems, after all, do not follow the laws of nature. The design of a tax system is not ordained by anything even remotely analogous to the law of gravity. Unlike the falling of a pebble released from a hand, a particular tax system is not the inevitable result of forces which humans can understand, perhaps control and sometimes escape from, but cannot alter. Rather, tax systems are products of human creation. They exist because they serve human objectives, reflecting the values of their designers. A tax system's design can reveal much about those values.
Alice G. Abreu";
quote[240] = "If, from the more wretched parts of the old world, we look at those which are in an advanced stage of improvement, we still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised, to furnish new pretences for revenues and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without tribute.
Thomas Paine";
quote[241] = "Tax reform consists of more than changes in those items that are called taxes. The real cost of government -- the total tax burden -- equals what government spends plus the cost to the public of complying with government mandates and regulations and of calculating, paying and taking measures to avoid taxes. Currently, this burden, at federal, state and local levels combined, exceeds half of national income: 40 percent in direct spending, and more than 10 percent in indirect costs. Anything that reduces that real cost -- lower government spending, elimination of costly regulations on individuals or businesses, simplification of explicit taxes - is a tax reform.
Milton Friedman";
quote[242] = "Modern taxation or tax making in its most characteristic aspect is a group contest in which powerful interests vigorously endeavour to rid themselves of present or proposed tax burdens. It is, first of all, a hard game in which he, who trusts wholly to economics, reason, and justice, will in the end retire beaten and disillusioned.
T.S. Adams ";
quote[243] = "It should be the policy of governments . . . never to lay such taxes as will inevitably fall on capital; since by so doing, they impair the funds for the maintenance of labour, and thereby diminish the future production of the country.
David Ricardo";
quote[244] = "When I chaired the appropriations committee, I saw the poor. And when I chaired the tax committee, I saw the rich.
Gordy Voss ";
quote[245] = "What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of revenue.
Thomas Paine";
quote[246] = "If you don't drink, smoke, or drive a car, you're a tax evader.
Thomas S. Foley";
quote[247] = "Needless tax complexity promotes chaos and confusion and gives the taxpayer a ready excuse for inattention to detail merging toward outright noncompliance.
Gene Steuerle ";
quote[248] = "We don't do tax policy in this country anymore, we do tax politics.
Christopher Bergin";
quote[249] = "Liberty produces excessive taxes; the effect of excessive taxes is slavery.
Charles Louis de Secondat";
quote[250] = "Why are the people starving? Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Lao Tzu";
quote[251] = "A dollar saved is bound to be taxed. And so is a penny earned.
Anonomous";
quote[252] = "Despite what lobbyists and think tanks would lead you to believe, the preponderance of evidence leans toward the conclusion that tax incentives have little effect on investment and economic growth.
Martin A. Sullivan";
quote[253] = "God will surely punish anyone who reinstitutes an old tax, for that very day, the son of the man who reinstituted the land tax caught a fever and three days later died.
Pope St. Gregory I ";
quote[254] = "No government can exist without taxation. This money must necessarily be levied on the people; and the grand art consists of levying so as not to oppress.
Frederick the Great ";
quote[255] = "Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a "taxing machine," to the contented a "machine for securing property."
Thomas Carlyle";
quote[256] = "The Treasury is constantly presented with proposals to accomplish all sorts of desirable social objectives through the tax system. In general, these objectives can be accomplished more effectively and economically by other means.
Stanley S. Surrey";
quote[257] = "There is only one way to kill capitalism - by taxes, taxes and more taxes.
Karl Marx";
quote[258] = "Policymakers use the tax laws for diverse and often conflicting purposes. Among these are raising revenue, as a macroeconomic tool for directing the national economy, as a bipartisan tool for cultivating favour with constituents, and as a partisan tool for implementing party objectives. The use of the tax laws for these conflicting purposes leads to the undermining of the integrity and coherence of the income tax, and increases the gross complexity that already plagues the tax laws.
Sheldon D. Pollack ";
quote[259] = "'Tis true that governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit everyone who enjoys a share of protection should pay out of his estate his proportion of the maintenance of it.
John Locke";
quote[260] = "Capitation (direct taxes on the individual) is more natural to slavery; a duty on merchandise is more natural to liberty, because it has not so direct a relation to the person.
Charles Louis de Secondat";
quote[261] = "Property is made the constitutional basis of taxation. This is not unreasonable. Governments are organized for the protection of persons and property and the expenses of the protection may very properly be apportioned among the persons protected according to the value of their property protected.
Morrison Waite ";
quote[262] = "What reason is there that he which laboureth much, and, sparing the fruits of his labour, consumeth little, should be more charged than he that, living idly, getteth little and spendeth all he gets, seeing the one hath no more protection from the commonwealth than the other?
Thomas Hobbes ";
quote[263] = "Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labour by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.
Ronald Reagan";
quote[264] = "There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.
Herbert Hoover ";
quote[265] = "Government can pay its bills with tax money, run up a budget deficit or print more cash, creating inflation. Inflation hurts the saver, deficits hurt the investor, taxes hurt the earner, and all three are usually the same person: you.
P.J. O'Rourke";
quote[266] = "The notion that taxes should be simpler is one of the very few propositions in tax policy that generates almost universal agreement. The fundamental paradox of tax simplification is that despite this consensus, almost every year tax rules become more complex.
William G. Gale ";
quote[267] = "Lots of people talk about simplifying the tax law. And lots of people agree that simplifying the tax law should be a policy priority. But the problem is that simplification is complicated, and it is politically dangerous work.
George Guttman ";
quote[268] = "I hold in my hand 1,379 pages of tax simplification.
Delbert L. Latta";
quote[269] = "That which angers men most is to be taxed above their neighbours.
Sir William Petty ";
quote[270] = "The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or their property, you are at sea without rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice or folly you may not commit.
J.R. McCulloch ";
quote[271] = "In a republican form of government, the true theory is to make no distinctions as to persons in the rates of taxation. Recognising no class for special favours, we ought not to create a class for special burdens.
Justin S. Morrill";
quote[272] = "Under wise and constitutional legislation, every citizen should contribute his proportion, however small the sum, to the support of government, and it is no kindness to urge any of our citizens to escape this obligation.
Stephen J. Field";
quote[273] = "The king employs a considerable part of the tribute in grants of largesse, bestowed by way of banquets or presents, to those whose support consolidates his authority, whereas their defection would endanger it. Do we not see modern governments as well using the public funds to endow social groups or classes, whose votes they are anxious to secure? Today the name is different, and it is called the redistribution of incomes by taxation.
Bertrand de Jouvenel ";
quote[274] = "As income tax, initially enacted at low rates and later seized upon as a means to redistribute income in favour of the lower classes, has become a facade covering loopholes and special provisions that render rates that are highly graduated on paper largely ineffective.
Milton Friedman";
quote[275] = "Whenever you have growth and [income tax rate] progressivity, people move into higher tax brackets and the government gets a larger take. The economy may expand fast, but government will expand even faster.
The Wall Street Journal";
quote[276] = "A person should be taxed according to his means.
The Talmud";
quote[277] = "The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.
Theodore Roosevelt";
quote[278] = "One will hardly believe that in order to become noble it is sufficient to become rich; and to cease to pay taxes it is sufficient to become noble. So there is only one way of escaping taxation and that is to make a fortune.
Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours";
quote[279] = "It is not too much to hope that some day we may get back on a tax basis of 10 percent, the old Hebrew tithe, which was always considered a fairly heavy tax.
Andrew Mellon ";
quote[280] = "A 10 percent flat tax should be our goal. After all, back in Bible times, the people of Israel paid a "tithe" -- that is, a 10 percent flat tax -- to God. If God Himself only demands a tithe, who does Uncle Sam think he is, demanding more?
Michael Reagan ";
quote[281] = "I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.
Theodore Roosevelt";
quote[282] = "The only effective design for diminishing the income inequality inherent in capitalism is the progressive income tax.
John Kenneth Galbraith";
quote[283] = "The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.
Adam Smith";
quote[284] = "Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.
Thomas Jefferson";
quote[285] = "I do not believe that the government should ask social legislation in the guise of taxation. If we are to adopt socialism, it should be presented to the people of this country as socialism and not under the guise of a law to collect revenue.
Calvin Coolidge ";
quote[286] = "The taxing power of government must be used to provide revenues for legitimate government purposes. It must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change. We've tried that, and surely we must be able to see it doesn't work.
Ronald Reagan ";
quote[287] = "It will be a sad day for the revenues if the goodwill of the people toward their taxing system is frittered away in efforts to accomplish by taxation moral reforms that cannot be accomplished by direct legislation.
Robert H. Jackson";
quote[288] = "The expense of government to the individuals of a great nation is like the expense of management to the joint tenants of a great estate, who are all obliged to contribute in proportion to their respective interests in the estate. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation.
Adam Smith";
quote[289] = "A good prince will tax as lightly as possible those commodities which are used by the poorest members of our society; e.g., grain, bread, beer, wine, clothing, and all other staples without which human life could not exist.
Desiderius Erasmus";
quote[290] = "He who only 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. He may urge that on account of his rank what is superfluous for a man in a lower position is necessary for him, but that is untrue, for a nobleman has only two legs like a cowman, and each has only one belly.
Jean Jacques Rousseau";
quote[291] = "Do we imagine that our assessments operate equally? Nothing can be more contrary to the fact. Wherever a discretionary power is lodged in any set of men over the property of their neighbours, they will abuse it.
Alexander Hamilton";
quote[292] = "Nothing is more familiar in taxation than the imposition of a tax upon a class or upon individuals who enjoy no direct benefit from its expenditure, and who are not responsible for the condition to be remedied.
Harlan F. Stone ";
quote[293] = "Uniform taxation upon those equally able to bear their fair shares of the burdens of government is the objective of every just government.
Hugo L. Black ";
quote[294] = "By squeezing the destitute of their bare subsistence the state deprives them of all strength. Of the poor man it makes a beggar, of the workman an idler, of an unfortunate a rogue, and thus leads through starvation to the gallows.
Guillaume Thomas Francois Raynal ";
quote[295] = "Perfect equality and perfect uniformity of taxation as regards individuals or corporations, or the different classes of property subject to taxation, is a dream unrealized. It may be admitted that the system which most nearly attains this is the best.
Samuel F. Miller ";
quote[296] = "There is no constitutional guaranty of equality of taxation.
Harlan F. Stone";
quote[297] = "Mathematical equality . . . cannot be reached in any system of taxation, and it is useless and idle to attempt it.
Rufus W. Peckham ";
quote[298] = "Let us not make the income tax so high that the man whose money we want to use in business prefers not to take the risk.
Wendell L. Willkie ";
quote[299] = "All taxes upon the transference of property of every kind, so far as they diminish the capital value of that property, tend to diminish the funds destined for the maintenance of productive labour.
Adam Smith";
quote[300] = "A sound tax policy must lessen, so far as possible, the burden of taxation, on those least able to bear it; and it must also remove those influences which might retard the continued steady development of business and industry on which, in the last analysis, so much of our prosperity depends.
Andrew Mellon ";
quote[301] = "I don't think we should be embarrassed that a large corporation pays nothing in tax. I've never seen a corporation enjoy a good meal. I've never seen a corporation go on vacation.
Andrew Lyon ";
quote[302] = "Corporations don't pay taxes, they collect them.
Paul H. O'Neill";
quote[303] = "The real friends of property are not those who would exempt the wealth of the country from bearing its fair share of the burdens of taxation, but rather those who seek to have every one, without reference to his locality, contribute from his substance, upon terms of equality with all others, to the support of the government.
John Marshall Harlan ";
quote[304] = "Eccentricities of incidence are common, and perhaps inevitable, in every system of taxation.
Benjamin N. Cardozo";
quote[305] = "Protection and taxation are not necessarily correlative obligations, nor precise equality of burden attainable, however desirable.
Horace H. Lurton ";
quote[306] = "Systems of taxation are not framed, nor is it possible to frame them, with perfect distribution of benefit and burden. Their authors must be satisfied with a rough and ready form of justice.
Benjamin N. Cardozo ";
quote[307] = "All taxes upon the articles of consumption, because of the power that must necessarily be vested in the officers who collect them, will in the end destroy the liberty of any people that permits them to be introduced.
Albert Gallatin";
quote[308] = "It may be true that plaintiff does not receive the same amount of benefit from some of these taxes, or from any of them, as do citizens living in the heart of the City. . . . But who can undertake to adjust with precise accuracy the amount which each individual in an organized civil community shall contribute to sustain the organization?
Samuel F. Miller ";
quote[309] = "One might as well compare the federal income tax of a banker whose net earnings are in the millions with that of a thousand clerks who by reason of exemptions are to pay no tax whatever. The comparison proves nothing unless it be the obvious fact that taxpayers are few when the count is at the highest level.
Benjamin N. Cardozo ";
quote[310] = "Taxes generally are imposed upon persons for the general advantages of living within the jurisdiction, not upon property, although generally measured more or less by reference to the riches of the person taxed.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ";
quote[311] = "The state is not called upon to explain the reasons for taxing the members of the one class more heavily than it does the members of the other.
Benjamin N. Cardozo ";
quote[312] = "Wealth has long been accepted as a fair measure of a tax assessment.
Stanley F. Reed";
quote[313] = "Income tax, intrinsically the most just of all taxes.
Justin S. Morrill ";
quote[314] = "The wit of man never devised a fairer or juster tax than a graduated income tax.
Champ Clark ";
quote[315] = "The income tax is a just law. It simply intends to put the burdens of government justly upon the backs of the people.
William Jennings Bryan ";
quote[316] = "There is no tax which, in its essence, is more just and equitable than an income tax.
John Marshall Harlan";
quote[317] = "I'm convinced that, if you use income as the base of taxation, you have inherent in the system a magnet that draws all kinds of complexities. That's what I think we've learned from history -- that you cannot keep a simple income tax.
Bill Archer ";
quote[318] = "A fair tax system should consistently tax spending, not work or savings, and should use progressive rates to meet whatever liberal or redistributive objectives it has.
Edward J. McCaffery ";
quote[319] = "It has long troubled me, however, that even when a consumption tax is mentioned by an economist or a politician, there is never expressed the fundamental reason why such a tax is the fairest kind of tax: that it taxes the use -- and hence the inability of anyone else to use -- the resources of the earth, which once belonged to no one, or to all mankind, or (arguably) to all creatures.
Edgar C. Keller";
quote[320] = "Those who support the death tax generally do so not for economic reasons but for political ones. They want to make the tax code "fair" by taxing away the lifetime wealth of others.
William Beach ";
quote[321] = "The estate tax has its roots in socialism.
Richard C. Shelby";
quote[322] = "Americans like "sin" taxes, such as those on cigarettes and alcohol. But the estate tax is the opposite case: it is an anti-sin, or a virtue, tax. It is a tax on intergenerational altruism, on thrift.
Edward J. McCaffery ";
quote[323] = "Succession duties first of all possess the grave economic fault of tending to fall on capital or accumulated wealth rather than on income; they therefore may retard progress.
C.F. Bastable";
quote[324] = "Opinions about death taxes vary greatly in a society relying on private incentives for economic growth. Some believe that these taxes hurt economic incentives, reduce saving, and undermine the economic system. But even they would concede that death taxes have less adverse effects on incentives than do income taxes of equal yield. Income taxes reduce the return from effort and risk taking as income is earned, whereas death taxes are paid only after a lifetime of work and accumulation and are likely to be given less weight by individuals in their work, saving, and investment decisions.
Joseph Pechman";
quote[325] = "But why should the frugal and thrifty among the rich be taxed heavily on their deathbeds, while the spendthrifts who live luxuriously are not?
Edward J. McCaffery ";
quote[326] = "Since the accumulation of a substantial estate is one of the motivations that drive people to work hard, a death tax on saving is indirectly a tax on work.
Richard Posner";
quote[327] = "Donors who are only interested in the tax benefits of their gifts may give philanthropy a bad name, but their money still helps.
Mark Litzler";
quote[328] = "The public appears uneasy about, if not hostile to, the increasing nonprofit commercialism. So far, charities have enjoyed a "halo effect" in our political economy. The rationalized myth of charities as selfless, donative, and volunteer-run deliverers of services to the poor has never entirely been true, but it underlies society's grant of tax exemption and tax deductibility for contributions. To the extent, however, that this quid depends on the idealized quo, should charity's core myth change -- in a way that becomes visible to the public -- society's willingness to alter the subsidies could also change.
Evelyn Brody";
quote[329] = "We have been mindful that for some businesses there is little, if any, meaningful difference between an improvement in financial performance achieved by cutting operating expenses and one that results from reducing taxes. Both reductions improve the financial statement. The tax law, however, requires that the intended transactions have economic substance separate and distinct from economic benefit achieved solely by tax reduction.
David Laro ";
quote[330] = "The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary. The time of payment, the manner of payment, the quantity to be paid, ought all to be clear and plain to the contributor, and to every other person, so that the tax payer is not put in the power of the tax gatherer.
Adam Smith";
quote[331] = "Simplicity in modern taxation is a problem of basic architectural design. Present legislation is insufferably complicated and nearly unintelligible. If it is not simplified, half of the population may have to become tax lawyers and tax accountants.
Henry C. Simons";
quote[332] = "I don't suppose we will ever get to the point where people are pleased to pay taxes, but we owe it to them to see that the collection is done as efficiently as possible, as courteously as possible, and always honestly.
Lyndon B. Johnson ";
quote[333] = "No other branch of the law (i.e. tax law) touches human activities at so many points. It can never be made simple, but we can try to avoid making it needlessly complex.
Robert H. Jackson ";
quote[334] = "Gross inequalities may not be ignored for the sake of ease of collection.
Owen J. Roberts";
quote[335] = "An accountant once told me that the definition of fair market value for tax purposes is the value arrived at in negotiations between a willing tax lawyer and a willing revenue agent, neither of whom has ever bought or sold anything of consequence in his life.
Paul H. Asofsky";
quote[336] = "There was wisdom as well as wit in the cynical wag's remark that the lawyers had transformed the ancient principle of "no taxation without representation" into a doctrine of "no taxation without litigation."
Robert H. Jackson ";
quote[337] = "Few of us ever test our powers of deduction, except when filling out an income tax form.
Laurence J. Peter";
quote[338] = "Governments likely to confiscate wealth are unlikely to find much wealth to confiscate in the long run.
Thomas Sowell ";
quote[339] = "High taxes . . . frequently afford a smaller revenue to the government than what might be drawn from more moderate taxes.
Adam Smith ";
quote[340] = "As the Roman Empire declined the resources of the farmers were exhausted by outrageous burdens of all taxes, the fields were abandoned, and the cultivated land reverted to waste.
Lactantius";
quote[341] = "It is a paradoxical truth, that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates.
John F. Kennedy ";
quote[342] = "The high duties which have been imposed upon the importation of many different sorts of foreign goods, in order to discourage their consumption in Great Britain, have in many cases served only to encourage smuggling; and in all cases have reduced the revenue of the customs below what more moderate duties would have afforded. The saying of Dr. Swift, that in the arithmetic of the customs two and two, instead of making four, make sometimes only one, holds perfectly true with regard to such heavy duties.
Adam Smith ";
quote[343] = "There is a limit to the taxing power of the state beyond which increased rates produce decreased revenues.
Calvin Coolidge";
quote[344] = "In levying taxes and in shearing sheep it is well to stop when you get down to the skin.
Austin O'Malley";
quote[345] = "Sophisticated tax practitioners do not, in fact, benefit when tax practitioner incompetence and tax avoidance succeed. Quite the reverse, as the profession discovered in the tax shelter era.
Burgess J.W. Raby and William L. Raby";
quote[346] = "It is reasonable that a man who denies the legality of a tax should have a clear and certain remedy. . . . Courts sometimes, perhaps, have been a little too slow to recognize the implied duress under which payment is made.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. ";
quote[347] = "Conflicts are multiplied by treating as questions of law what really are disputes over proper accounting. The mere number of such questions and the mass of decisions they call forth becomes a menace to the certainty and good administration of the law.
Robert H. Jackson";
quote[348] = "The question where an income is earned is always a matter of doubt when the business is begun in one country and ended in another.
William Howard Taft";
quote[349] = "One of the major characteristics of our tax system, and one in which we can take a great deal of pride, is that it operates primarily through individual self-assessment.
John F. Kennedy";
quote[350] = "The United States has a system of taxation by confession. That a people so numerous, scattered and individualistic annually assesses itself with a tax liability, often in highly burdensome amounts, is a reassuring sign of the stability and vitality of our system of self- government. What surprised me in once trying to help administer these laws was not to discover examples of recalcitrance, fraud or self- serving mistakes in reporting, but to discover that such derelictions were so few.
Robert H. Jackson";
quote[351] = "We can trace the personal history of a man, and his successes and failures, just by looking at his tax returns from his first job to his retirement.
Charles A. Church";
quote[352] = "The right to tax "in its nature acknowledges no limits."
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.";
quote[353] = "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Robert Heinlein";
quote[354] = "It is one thing to impose a tax on the income or property of a preacher. It is quite another thing to exact a tax from him for the privilege of delivering a sermon.
William O. Douglas";
quote[355] = "Those of us who understand human history know the role taxation has played in shaping the destiny of mankind. The matter of taxes -- more specifically, the right to tax -- is clearly no stranger to controversy and has frequently served as the catalyst for revolutionary change.
Owen Arthur";
quote[356] = "In tax shelter transactions, an elaborate series of formal steps is contrived to lead to an unreasonably beneficial tax result, usually flowing from some defect or ambiguity in the tax law.
Peter C. Canellos ";
quote[357] = "Definition of a corporate tax shelter: A deal done by very smart people that, absent tax considerations, would be very stupid.
Michael J. Graetz ";
quote[358] = "Tax planning is driven by the fact that under a non-neutral tax law, transactions or arrangements whose economic differences are minor can have significantly different tax consequences.
James W. Wetzler";
quote[359] = "Where there is at least a general suspicion of much unnecessary expense, and great misapplication of the public revenue, the laws which guard it are little respected.
Adam Smith";
quote[360] = "No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores.
Lord Clyde";
quote[361] = "If you are truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract -- teach him to deduct.
Fran Lebowitz";
quote[362] = "Never let the tax tail wag the economic dog.
Laura Peebles";
quote[363] = "My law firm had a rule -- at least it seemed to be a rule -- that everybody that came had to spend at least a year working on taxes. The general rationale for that rule as far as I could understand it was that taxes were so important to everything that you do, whatever the kind of case you are handling, you have got to know something about the tax consequences of things.
Charles A. Horsky";
quote[364] = "A tax adviser who instils confidence and trust in his or her client or corporate partner becomes highly valued. Indeed, the term guru is generally reserved for two types of individuals -- spiritual guides for followers of Eastern religion and tax advisers for adherents of Western capitalism.
Franklin L. Green";
quote[365] = "Who will protect the integrity of the tax law if the tax lawyers won't?
Christopher Bergin";
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