Hillary Clinton Quotes

It's really a question of fairness and what kind of country we're going to live in. There are 22,000 people making over $1 million. They're paying an effective tax rate in the teens. As Warren Buffett said, he pays less in taxes effectively than his secretary does. That's not right.

There's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers

Bush already gave obscene tax breaks to people like me and Warren Buffet, and we are saying it's not fair.

I did a little study of my office, and the average worker pays a higher tax rate than I do. If the government needs money, it should get if from me rather than my secretary of the person who will serve my lunch today.

In this time of need, the people who can afford it, those making more than $1 million a year, should not pay a tax rate that is less than their secretary pays. This is not class envy. This is not class warfare. This is basic arithmetic.

The 400 of us [the richest Americans] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you're in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.

If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.

The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes.

Everyone wants the rich to pay more in taxes.

You know what isn't class warfare? Progressive taxation, as in, say, expecting billionaires to pay at least as much in taxes as their secretaries. Ideally, in fact, they should pay more.

Every time a congressman or pundit says its 'class warfare' to increase taxes on the wealthy, it's a massive lie.

I don't believe in trickle-down economics. I don't think that people who have the most are inclined to share it, generally.

According to the IRS, the wealthiest 400 Americans, who earned an average of roughly $270 million in 2008, paid an average tax rate of just 18.2 percent that year. That's about the same rate paid by a single truck driver in Rhode Island. It's not right, and we need to restore fairness to our tax code.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

In a morally adjusted economy ... the rich should not get richer if the poor get poorer.

If America is about fairness, it is about equal incomes paying equal taxes.

We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

I don’t think our tax system is very equitable.

This country is very good at creating wealth, but not very good at distributing it.

Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.

Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

We must ensure the economy really works for all, to address unconscionable wealth and income disparities that allow access to opportunity for some over others.

Almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right? And of the rich just not paying their fair share.

A Wall Street money manager should not be able to pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or a nurse.