Political Quotes

“The companies doing business here are not real companies; they are phony-baloney shell corporations that are designed to hide assets and to play games with the tax system. This income never even makes it into the 18.2 percent of the Helmsley Building. This gets hidden away completely. When our tax system is rigged so it permits billionaires to pay lower tax rates than truck drivers and allows the wealthiest to avoid taxes by hiding assets in phony offshore corporations, something is not right. With multitrillion dollar budget deficits threatening our Nation's prosperity, we have to do something to make our tax system more fair for regular Americans. I have been working on legislation which would ensure that millionaires and billionaires pay an effective tax rate at least as high as is paid by middle-class families. This would require all taxpayers with income over $1 million a year, indexed to inflation, to pay at least a 25-percent rate. A 25-percent rate is the marginal rate middle-class taxpayers currently pay on income, from about $34,000 of income to about $84,000 of income, depending on the size of the family and the deductions they get. It seems fair to me to ask people at the highest end of the income spectrum to pay at least the tax rate middle- class families in the $34,000-to-$84,000 range actually pay. It simply doesn't make sense to have the wealthiest abusing these tax gimmicks to pay lower tax rates than middle-class families.…”