T.R. Reid Quotes.
When it comes to taxation, Americans are still banging out letters on a typewriter and dropping them in the mail box while everybody else has moved on to texting and Instagram.
Corporations use all sorts of complex stratagems to move their profits overseas, and thus escape the U.S. income tax.
The higher the rate, the more interest there is in avoiding the tax. Either you move or you shift your profits overseas, as American corporations have proven very good at doing.
The income tax only taxed the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. It was aimed at the top 4 percent, and the top rate then in 1913, was 7 percent. Woodrow Wilson had a big ceremony and said, “I’m delighted to be president at the creation of this popular new tax.”
If you get rid of all these giveaways and loopholes and deductions and credits, then you can sharply lower the rates.
France, they’re the world champion at soaking the rich on taxes. And at one point, they had what they called a hyper tax, 75 percent, and GГ©rard Depardieu and many others left the country.
Relative to the world’s other advance democracies, Americans get off easy on tax day. Of the 35 richest countries, the U.S. ranks 32nd in total tax burden.
I really like the idea of consumption tax, and most countries have a pretty serious consumption tax. It’s called a value-added tax or a goods and services tax … It’s a sales tax. It doesn’t tax labor, it doesn’t tax savings or investment – it taxes consumption.
Our tax code becomes so absurdly complex every 32 years that we have no choice but to scrap it and re-write. The 32-year period is up in 2018. So the time has come. History tells us that we’re going to produce a fairer, simpler tax code by 2018.
We cut tax exemptions in 1986, it was the most admired tax reform in U.S. history. Congress and the president worked together then to eliminate scores of loopholes and exemptions and deductions; this made taxes much simpler, and allowed a major cut in tax rates.
In the United States, unlike any other advanced democracy, money really talks. Our Supreme Court has said that spending money on politicians is a form of free speech. No other court has said that.
