William M West Certified Public Accountant

Tax Quotations from the
Tax Analysts' 1997 Calendar:
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...the time is ripe for a review by the IRS of questions relating to public access to these documents.

-- Tom Field to IRS Commissioner Jerome Kurtz; Tax Analysts and Advocates filed suit on July 15, 1977 to require disclosure of the GCMs underlying published IRS rulings relating to foreign oil production income and the IRS's index system for GCMs.

Compliant taxpayers are at an extreme competitive disadvantage as compared with those corporate service providers that selectively report their income or do not even bother to file tax returns.

-- IRS Commissioner Margaret Richardson, July 28, 1993

We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

-- Leona Helmsley, whose tax evasion convictions were affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on July 30, 1991.

As a nation of individuals we will be better able to meet the present and to attack whatever the future has in store for us if we are paid up in our income tax...

-- Federal Reserve Bank of New York Chairman Beardsly Ruml on the pay-as-you-go income tax law, which went into effect in July 1943.

I prefer the IRS to be criticized as too tough.

-- Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., during a July 1994 Senate Governmental Affairs Committee meeting.

The Gephardt flat tax is about as flat as the Rocky Mountains.

-- House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, July 1995.

These days it seems you can't swing a dead catfish in this town without hitting the author of a flat-tax plan, or at least a major tax overhaul.

-- House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, July 1995.

We don't want to screw up a set of mechanicl rules that work for almost all taxpayers just to catch one transaction.

-- Monte Jackel at the August 5, 1994 meeting of the ABA Tax Section Partnership Committee.

We do not have a rogue agent problem at the Service.

-- IRS Commissioner Margaret Richardson, August 6, 1994.

It is in my judgment necessary under the circumstances of the case to take measures for calling forth the militia in order to suppress the combinations aforesaid, and to cause the laws to be duly executed...

-- President George Washington on August 7, 1794, calling for militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion.

The establishment of sound means toward a greater future economic security of the American people is dictated by a prudent consideration of the hazards involved in our national life.

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Social Security Act, which he signed into law August 14, 1935.

Read my lips -- no new taxes.

-- George Bush on August 18, 1988, at the Republican National convention.

A significant [effort] to bring about the end of this artificial bar to the right to vote in some of our states.

-- President John F. Kennedy on the August 27, 1962 passage by the U.S. House of the 24th Amendment.

...I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective -- a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly with the size of the estate.

-- Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in his August 31, 1910 "New Nationalism" speech.

A momentous legislative act in its consequences approaching in importance such legislation as that of April 16 [1861] abolishing compensatory slavery in the District of Columbia, and of June 19 abolishing slavery in the territories.

-- U.S. economist Sidney Ratner of Congress's August 1861 passage of the first federal income tax law.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

-- Herbert Hoover, born in August 1874.

Despite the complexity of today's tax law, I think that tax lawyers must not forget how to be good lawyers.

-- IRS Commissioner Margaret Richardson to the ABA Tax Section, August 1994.

For taxpayers who must deal with the IRS, it's often a David vs. Goliath fight that leaves David the taxpayer without a slingshot.

-- Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, R-Conn., Sept. 12, 1995.

This issue commences Tax Notes, a weekly publication designed to provide basic research services to journalists and others concerned with federal tax matters.

-- Intro to first edition of Tax Notes, published by Tax Analysts and Advocates on September 18, 1972.

I don't think we should have to pay user fees for to pay for a government that we're already paying for.

-- Rep. Jim Lightfoot, R-Iowa, during the September 22, 1994 debate on the Treasury-Postal appropriations bill.

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William M West Certified Public Accountant
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