Political Quotes

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. I'll just say one thing. I think we've beaten this dead horse about as much as we can. Is 95 percent reasonable? It's unreasonable, in my opinion; 92 percent is unreasonable; 89 percent is unreasonable. There ought to be no such figure because money should be allocated where needed and should be raised where it can best be raised on the questions of equity, efficiency, et cetera. And I'll give you one other example. Certain States have coastlines. The gulf coast has a lot of hurricanes. We spend a lot of money there. Should we say, well, gee, we don't have as many hurricanes. We shouldn't spend that percentage of our tax money on hurricane relief in the gulf. We don't say that because we're one country. We don't say that we shouldn't spend money on relief to States that have other natural disasters because we don't have those kinds of natural disasters. As a general principle, money should be raised, and there's no difference because you say it's a user fee. All taxes, in some sense, are a user fee. They're the price for civilization, as Mark Twain said. And maybe you shouldn't have gasoline taxes. You should finance it some other way. That's a whole different discussion. Yes, as I said before, I'm quite well aware that people are going to come here.…”