A Quote by Rex Stout

The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.

Rex Stout

Quote Topics

Added Crime Greatly Income Income Tax Mercenary Tax

Quote Author

Rex Stout
American - Writer
December 1, 1886 - October 27, 1975

The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade. So it makes the job of raising revenue easier. The revenues from the VAT can then be used to lower taxes on income and saving and investment. The Value-Added tax doesn't penalize work or saving; it's a tax on buying stuff.

T.R. Reid

A universal basic income funded by a value-added tax, which is a tax placed on a product whenever value is added at each stage of the supply chain, from production to the point of sale, would spread the benefits of automation to a much wider group of people.

Andrew Yang

There are big winners in Paul Ryan's 'Roadmap,' and you can guess who they are. He would cut taxes for the wealthy, completely eliminate the corporate income tax, and create a value added tax.

Jan Schakowsky

Let's take the nine states that have no income tax and compare them with the nine states with the highest income tax rates in the nation. If you look at the economic metrics over the last decade for both groups, the zero-income-tax-rate states outperform the highest-income-tax-rate states by a fairly sizable amount.

Arthur Laffer

I support both a Fair Tax and a Flat Tax plan that would dramatically streamline the tax system. A Fair Tax would replace all federal taxes on personal and corporate income with a single national tax on retail sales, while a Flat Tax would apply the same tax rate to all income with few if any deductions or exemptions.

Ralph Hall

In 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx's Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. ... I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS.

James Traficant

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.

T.R. Reid

What you do by having an income tax rate reduction across the board, you really provide great incentives for people to work, produce, and increase output. So I would support a carbon tax in replacement for a progressive income tax.

Arthur Laffer

If you look at the performance of the zero-income-tax-rate states and the highest-income-tax-rate states, I believe a large amount of their difference is due to taxes. Not only is it true of the last decade, but I took these numbers back 50 years. And, there's not one year in the last 50 where the zero-income-tax-rate states have not outperformed the highest-income-tax-rate states.

Arthur Laffer

There is the general belief that the corporation income tax is a tax on the "rich" and on the "fat cats." But with pension funds owning 30% of American large business-and soon to own 50%-the corporation income tax, in effect, eases the load on those in top income brackets and penalizes the beneficiaries of pension funds.

Peter Drucker

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.

Alan Keyes

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta.

Hermann Weyl

The Value-Added Tax, a sales tax that applies at every level of business transactions, is an easy tax for governments to collect, and a hard tax to evade.

T.R. Reid

No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obama's plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether it's their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax.

Joe Biden

It was not until the Abraham Lincoln administration that an income tax was imposed on Americans. Its stated purpose was to finance the war, but it took until 1872 for it to be repealed. During the Grover Cleveland administration, Congress enacted the Income Tax Act of 1894. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1895. It took the Sixteenth Amendment (1913) to make permanent what the Framers feared -- today's income tax.