Yes, it's Budget Day ...

 ... so to help journalists desperate for something to write about before the Budget comes down, here are some quotable quotes. Send a copy to your favourite columnist:

"The average ... family head will be forced to do twenty years’ labour to pay taxes in his or her lifetime."
    ~ James Bovard

"The average family pays more in taxes than it spends on food, clothing, and shelter combined."

    ~ Congressman Dick Armey

"If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganising about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working."

    ~ Thomas Sowell

"I think coercive taxation is theft, and government has a moral duty to keep it to a minimum."
    ~ William Weld

"A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill."
    ~ Hans F. Sennholz

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."
    ~ Richard Lamm

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone."

    ~ Frédéric Bastiat

"Apparently, politicians can change the planetary climate, but they can’t fix the potholes, repair the drains, or balance their books."

    ~ Alice Smith

"The secret to balancing the budget is to remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody's head. Not paying taxes is against the law. If you don't pay your taxes you'll be fined. If you don't pay the fine you'll be jailed. If you try to escape from jail, you'll be shot. Thus, I - in my role as citizen and voter - am going to shoot you - in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck - if you don't pay your share of the national tab. Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask myself, ‘Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?’"

    ~ PJ O'Rourke

"The state is never accused of greed. There is no limit to what it may take from us. And those who live on what is taken in taxes are never accused of greed either. Greed is virtually identified with the "profit motive." We have no invidious term for the parasitic motive. The state and its clients are all but immune from moral criticism."
    ~ Joseph Sobran

"[There are dangers in] the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts."     
    ~ Winston Churchill

"To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours."

    ~ John Stuart Mill

"When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the state demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called "tax." 
    ~ Jeff Daiell

"There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation."
    ~ Frédéric Bastiat

"Taxation is far greater an evil than theft. It is a form of slavery. If you cannot choose the disposition of your property, you are a slave. If you must ask permission to work, and/or pay involuntary tribute to anyone from your wages, you are a slave. If you are not allowed to dispose of your life (another way of defining money, since it represents portions of your time and effort, which is what your life is composed of) in the time, manner and amount of your choosing, you are a slave."

    ~ Rick Tompkins

"Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities."

    ~ Robert Nozick

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."
~ Ayn Rand

“Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilised society, since taxation represents force.”
    ~ Mark Skousen

"The bureaucrat’s first objective, of course, is preservation of his job – provided by the big-government system, at the taxpayers expense. … Whether real world problems get solved or not is of secondary importance. It doesn’t take much cynicism, in fact, to see that the bureaucrats have a vested interest in not having problems solved. If the problems did not exist (or had been invented), there would be no reason for the bureaucrat to have a job.”

~ William Simon, former U.S Treasury Secretary

"… thou shall not steal, even by majority vote …"

    ~ Gary North

"In levying taxes and in shearing sheep, it is well to stop when you get down to the skin."

    ~ Austin O’Malley

"Public works are not accomplished by the miraculous power of a magic wand. They are paid for by funds taken away from the citizens."

    ~ Ludwig von Mises

"A [tax loophole is] something that benefits the other guy. If it benefits you, it is tax reform."

    ~ Russell B. Long

[S]tatism is but socialised dishonesty; it is feathering the nests of some with feathers coercively plucked from others – on the grand scale. There is no moral difference between the act of a pickpocket and the progressive income tax or any other social program."

    ~ Leonard Read

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”
    ~ Winston Churchill

"Taxation without representation is tyranny."
    ~ James Otis

"Taxation WITH representation ain't so hot either."
    ~ Gerald Barzan

"If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalised."

~ Lysander Spooner

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before."
    ~ HL Mencken

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin."
    ~Mark Twain

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it."
    ~ Ronald Reagan

"According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family’s budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output — and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us?"

    ~ Daniel Mitchell

"Death and taxes are inevitable; at least death doesn't get worse every year."
    ~ Will Rogers

"When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of free government."
    ~ former US President Grover Cleveland

"Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down." -
    ~ Charles Adams

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidises non-work."

    ~ Milton Friedman

"When you subsidise poverty and failure, you get more of both."

    ~ James Dale Davidson, US National Taxpayers Union

"The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less."
    ~ Henry Hazlitt

"The poor of the world cannot be made rich by redistribution of wealth. Poverty can't be eliminated by punishing people who've escaped poverty, taking their money and giving it as a reward to people who have failed to escape."
    ~ PJ O'Rourke

"A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul."
    ~ George Bernard Shaw

"There cannot be a good tax nor a just one; every tax rests its case on compulsion."

~ Frank Chodorov

"Freedom is the quality of being free from the control of regulators and tax collectors. If I want to be free their control, I must not impose controls on others."
    ~ Hans F. Sennholz

"There's only one way to kill capitalism--by taxes, taxes, and more taxes." -
    ~ Karl Marx

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."
    ~ Vladimir Lenin

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
    ~ PJ O'Rourke

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
    ~ Bertrand de Jouvenel

"The power to tax involves the power to destroy."
    ~ former US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed."
    ~ Robert Heinlein

"Taxes are the sinews of the state."
    ~ Cicero

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

    ~ Frederic Bastiat

"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors, and miss."
    ~ Robert Heinlein