My biggest objection to raising taxes is that it feeds the government addiction to spending money.
Having billions of dollars immediately available to plug budget holes without raising taxes is very appealing. And to the delight of Wall Street investors, state and local governments often fail to ask the important questions or consider the long-term impact.
When I became mayor of New York City, I had a $2.4 billion deficit. And everybody wanted me to raise taxes. I said, 'If I raise taxes, I'll drive people out of New York City, and then I'll be raising taxes again.' So what I did was I cut expenses by 15 percent.
The problem is government spends too much. So raising taxes is what politicians do, instead of reducing spending.
I'm not for raising taxes on anyone - period.
I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending, either one, until we get this economy off the ground. I'll pay more, but it won't solve the problem.
I am not for raising taxes in a recession, especially when it comes to job creators that we need so desperately to start creating jobs again.
People question me all the time about my experience. They question my experience in politics, and the first thing I always tell them is yes, I have no experience raising taxes over and over. I have no experience increasing the debt in a state.
When President Obama speaks about raising taxes on the rich, he speaks about high-income employees and small business owners, not entrepreneurs who build big businesses.
Americans don't think we should be raising taxes on anybody, especially in the middle of a recession.
Raising taxes does nothing to allow the economy to recover.
Let's be clear: raising taxes during a very slow recovery is likely to lead to another recession, and it will do absolutely nothing to balance the budget.
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
One of the most lethal mistakes a public official can make is raising taxes and not paying your own.
I believe Nebraskans appreciate the fiscal discipline I've brought to state government, balancing the budget without raising taxes and prioritizing education funding.
Raising taxes won't create private sector jobs.
Now it is unambiguously clear that trickle-down economics does not work. But what does that mean? That means we have to structure our economic policies to make sure that we have shared prosperity. And you don't do that by giving a tax cut to the big winners and raising taxes on those who have not done very well. Your economic policy has to respond to the way our economic system has been working.
The centerpiece of Obamanomics - raising taxes on high earners and investors and lowering them on the middle class - is attacked by free-marketers for penalizing economic success and possibly further stalling economic growth.
The biggest source of getting the country to a balanced budget is not by raising taxes or by cutting spending. It's by encouraging the growth of the economy.
Look, only in Washington is not raising taxes considered a tax cut. Nobody's getting a tax cut here. We're not cutting taxes. We're preventing tax increases from occurring.
In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.
People who wouldn’t think of raising taxes think there’s nothing wrong with mortgaging the future of their state
by deficit spending and borrowing.
I am not for raising taxes on the American people in a soft economy.
Raising taxes kills conservatives.
Someone is going to have to explain to me at some time how raising taxes on job-creators is going to create more jobs.