A Fine Mess Quotes

“If this 80% top marginal rate were applied to earnings over $500,000, Piketty says, the tax regime would help to even out inequality without stunting economic growth. Beyond the income”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The income tax burden, he says, should fall more heavily on those who make their money on financial dealing; he says the U.S. system, in which the tax on capital gains is much lower than the tax on wages and salaries, is simply upside-down and thus counterproductive for dealing with the growth of inequality.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“In the Times of London, the Conservative Party parliamentarian Matt Ridley called on his colleagues to “start spreading the good news on inequality.” The good news, he said, is that everybody is getting better off; it just happens at different rates. “Any increase in wealth inequality or pre-tax income inequality in Britain or America is caused by the rich getting disproportionately richer, not by the poor getting poorer.”4”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“has a less than 1-in-20 shot at making it to the top. The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough. But the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The American sage Will Rogers captured this concept precisely. Of course people like low taxes, Rogers said, but there’s something even more important: “People want JUST taxes, more than they want lower taxes. They want to know that every man is paying his proportionate share according to his wealth.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The crucial point is not how much somebody pays in taxes but rather how much she has left after paying. This biblical lesson has been invoked time and again to justify a tax code that calls on the rich to pay higher rates than the poor.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“seventy-three thousand pages of IRS regulations, he laughed at the very suggestion.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“Internal Revenue Service: “If you determined your tax in the earlier year by using the Schedule D Tax Worksheet, or the Qualified Dividends and Capital Gain Tax Worksheet, and you receive a refund in 2016 of a deduction claimed in that year, you will have to recompute your tax for the earlier year to determine if the recovery must be included in your income.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“A consumption tax like the VAT is paid by everybody, including those who pay no income tax and those who are in the country illegally.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“47% problem—that is, the significant number of people who don’t pay income tax.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The “Tax Complexity Lobby,” as Forbes magazine called it, includes tax-preparation firms like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, as well as companies that make tax-preparation software”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“the number one most serious problem facing American taxpayers. That problem is the complexity of the tax code.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, a voluminous and hugely complex new law, which included the laughable “anti-complexity clause”—that is, Section 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(IX).”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“In the 1960s, the corporate tax brought in about 33% of U.S. tax revenues. Today, the same tax provides less than 9% of revenues; that means individual taxpayers have to take up the slack and pay more.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“By routing its manufacturing through a tiny factory in Puerto Rico, Microsoft saved over $4.5 billion in taxes on goods sold in the United States” over a three-year period.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“broker or banker who invests other people’s money can count his own salary as “capital gains” and thus pay tax on it at the reduced, capital gains rate.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The argument for a lower tax rate on capital income—an argument supported by many economists—runs as follows: (1) economies need capital investment to grow and create new jobs; (2) capital investment by definition is risky (you could lose it all); and (3) therefore, a lower rate of tax on potential gains is necessary to encourage people to make those essential, but risky, investments.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The widest definition of “wealthy” is in India, where a 1% wealth tax kicks in for anybody whose net worth is more than 3 million rupees, which comes to about $45,000. (In India, that still means a small percentage of the population.)”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“2012 tax-reform act stipulated that members of the national parliament and the prime minister’s cabinet would pay 5% higher rates than anybody else in the country. “We did it as a gesture of solidarity,” Kažimír said. “The message was, okay, if the parliament is going to raise taxes, we’ll see to it that members of parliament pay more than anybody else. “It’s the same kind of political bullshit you probably have in your Congress,” Kažimír told me.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“The big gorilla of homeowner tax breaks is the deduction for mortgage interest, which reduces income tax revenues by about $100 billion each year. That is, this one tax deduction costs more than the budgets of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, the Interior, and the Treasury combined.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“ALL THOSE ISSUES SHOULD be enough to demonstrate that the deduction for charitable contributions is costly, unfair, and easy to abuse. But there’s actually a more fundamental problem with this particular deduction: It doesn’t work.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“special preference to “an automobile manufacturer incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916.” That would be General Motors, although the name of the firm does not appear.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“anybody buying a qualified plug-in electric car—the list of approved vehicles includes sleek, sporty cars like the $105,000 Tesla Model S P85D and the $138,000 BMW i8—can subtract up to $7,500 from the income tax he or she owes Uncle Sam.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“Most of them ran counter to the ethos of BBLR. Virtually all of them made the tax code more complicated—including that bizarre “anti-complexity clause,” Section 7803(c)(2)(B)(ii)(IX). Three decades after the passage of the 1986 reforms, the U.S. tax code is a mockery of the BBLR principle.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“What had been the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 became the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, which it still is today.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“By the mid-1980s, the tax code allowed depletion or depreciation allowances that cut taxes for cement companies, Christmas tree farms, apple orchards, gravel pits, railroad cars, rubber importers, cattle growers, and many, many more. There was even a depreciation allowance for human beings; professional sports teams were allowed to write off their players as “depreciable assets” as they slowed down with age.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“If there’s no deduction for contributions, charities don’t have to produce a certified receipt for each donation, and the contributor doesn’t have to track down the nine-digit Tax ID Number of each charity she wants to support.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“BBLR means that if the tax base—that is, the total amount of income, or sales, or property that can be taxed—is kept as large as possible, then the tax rate—that is, the percentage that people have to give to the government—can be kept low. Virtually all economists and tax experts agree that this is the best way to run a tax regime.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“Recently, there has been considerable public concern about the fact that 47% of Americans pay no income tax; the presidential candidate Mitt Romney opined that these are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax.”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System

“We pour more money into national defense than anybody else; our defense budgets, in fact, are bigger than those in the next eleven countries combined”
― T.R. Reid, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System