Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed ...
For the first time since 2007 there is political momentum behind fixing the immigration system. President Obama in his State of the Union speech reached out to the right-wing by saying illegal immigrants seeking citizenship will have to pay taxes, le...
When I first did 'Moby,' I didn't realize how taxing it would be. I was climbing fifty feet up in the air and climbing down. Literally, it's so busy, you feel you're on a ship. You're always moving; you're constantly adding clothes or taking them off...
Vicomte de Valmont: [Armand, who is getting all of his possessions taken by the tax collector, stands in the presence of Vicomte de Valmont] Please, don't get up. Armand: I have to. They're taking my bed.
Nathan: It's funny. You know. No matter how rich you get, shit goes wrong. You can't insulate yourself from it. I used to think it was death and taxes you couldn't avoid, but it's actually death and shit.
The Illinois Constitution was written before they realized they'd have a city the size of Chicago in the state. The constitution had severe limits on the ability of any city to raise monies through taxes and bonds. When Chicago grew explosively, they...
Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam ...
I was at the 1976 Republican Convention in Kansas City. I was running 'Nobody for President' at the time. I printed up these press releases and handed them out to the crowd at the Kemper Arena. 'Nobody keeps campaign promises.' 'Nobody lowers your ta...
The cardinal rule of taxation is that whatever you put a levy on, you'll inevitably get less of. Taxing corporate activity means less investing, less hiring, fewer jobs and a smaller economy, which hurts the rich, the poor and the middle class alike.
Few Americans realize it, but the United Nations is driving to take control over the Internet. You remember, the folks who want a worldwide income tax and who put Syria and Iran on their Human Rights Committee.
Governing isn't as easy as you think. Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory - to balance the budget and cut taxes, for example. You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending comb...
As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where o...
Over the last 10 years a huge amount has been achieved in getting people into work. Measures such as the New Deal, tax credits, the minimum wage and improved childcare have brought about record numbers of people in work, a number that is still rising...
There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains)...
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly mo...
Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed – that's where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They're the cynical corpses of idealistic young people who thought the system could be reformed.
One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs.
...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary li...
Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions...
Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club
He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of s...
