35 Quotes by Steven Rattner

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on ‘unearned income’ have bounced up and down with regularity, and I’ve never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

Finally, let’s keep well in mind the most important lesson of the auto rescue: While government should stay away from the private sector as much as possible, markets do occasionally fail, and when they do government can play a constructive role, as it did in the case of the auto rescue.

Increased revenues, meaning higher taxes, will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan, and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy – the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health – should provide those funds.

The highest-income Americans don’t need tax-free health insurance, mortgage interest deductions or deferred taxation on retirement funds.

Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between ‘Master of the Universe’ financiers and pretty much everyone else.

Most troublesome is the legalization of ‘crowd funding,’ the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we’ve stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.

As a beneficiary of the carried interest loophole, I’ve seen firsthand the lack of any difference between the work involved in generating a carried interest and the work done by millions of other professionals who are taxed at the full 35 percent rate.