Jim Talent Quotes

Those who willfully conceal assets overseas undermine the playing field for all taxpayers.

There's something fundamentally grubby about the rich paying people to seek out cracks in the system to hide their money.

It isn't only rich countries that suffer from the effects of tax havens. Developing countries also lose billions of dollars in tax revenues due each year because wealthy individuals and some companies use tax havens to move assets and income offshore.

Friends, I'm angry about what's happening in politics today! Why is it wrong to ask the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations to pay their fair share?

And it would be fair. Everyone will pay the same tax and it will eliminate tax cheaters and corporate shenanigans.

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.

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.

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 tax code is weighted toward the ultra-wealthy and ultra-wealthy corporations and has created an offshore aristocracy of people who can afford to hire an army of accountants and lawyers. This shifts the tax burden to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and others.

The wealthiest can afford to pay more in taxes. That's a part of the deal. That makes sense. I don't know anyone that doesn't agree with that.

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

We shouldn't be encouraging people to set up Cayman Island funds.

Reliable numbers about the amount of dirty money around the world are difficult to come by. But according to an estimate by the nonprofit Global Financial Integrity group, $1 trillion vanishes from the developing world's economies every year.

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

The truth is, however rich people get, they hate paying tax. Some live abroad for a year, or years at a time just to avoid it. Bizarre really - desperate economic migrants are driven to leave their homeland because of poverty; tax exiles are driven overseas by their wealth.

Those who take their money abroad in an effort to avoid paying American taxes should lose their American citizenship.

Multi-millionaires who pay half or less than half of the percentage of tax the rest of us pay justify their actions by saying they pay what the law requires. Though true, the fact is they found ways within the law to beat the purpose of the law - which, in the case of taxes, is that we all pay our fair share.

The American people are screaming out saying it's unfair that the wealthiest, the largest corporations who can afford the best attorneys, the best accountants, take advantage of these special tax treatments that the lobbyists have, along with lawmakers, have cooked in the books here.

Everyone wants the rich to pay more in taxes.

I think the latest estimates were that we have about 250,000 millionaires and billionaires. President Obama wants to increase their taxes 13 percent.

Governments, of course, can - and do - soak the rich.

It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

Corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion are global problems, not just challenges for developing countries.

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