Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, Congressman Webster and I were walking past the rear of the Chamber, and we looked at each other kind of funny after some former comments and thought we were walking by a set for comedy hour. I mean, I think I really heard somebody allude to the fact that we need more government regulation and for sure we need more taxes on the oil companies, those evil oil companies, and the answer to all of our problems is to tax them more--as if the Members of this body and the public are stupid enough to think that at the end of the year, those big oil companies are just going to write a check for an extra zillion dollars. Let's say we tax those evil oil companies another dollar a gallon. They're not going to write the check. We know what's going to happen: They're going to raise the price a dollar a gallon, or, given the corporate greed we sometimes see, round it off to 2 bucks a gallon. Corporations don't pay taxes. Corporations collect taxes. They collect taxes from consumers who ultimately pay the tax. You add a tax to a product, and the consumer is going to pay more. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.”