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It is commonly assumed that the two simple tenses of English (We love/loved the wine) do not involve verbal periphrasis. Instead, I consider evidence which supports an analysis of the English simple present and past tenses as compound tenses. For non-vernacular Englishes, the auxiliary is covert; however, there are numerous cases of variably overt auxiliaries in different vernacular English constructions yielding simple present and simple past interpretations which support the proposal. The conclusion that all English tenses (present, past, perfect) are compound entails two concomitant hypotheses: (i) English verb forms traditionally characterized as present and past tense verbs are non-finite (reviving an idea put forward by Sola 1996), and (ii) meaning differences between simple past and the perfect tenses does not derive from the absence vs. presence of an auxiliary. Thus, the difference in interpretation between we loved that wine (past) and we’ve always loved that wine (present perfect) cannot find its source in the absence versus presence of have, which itself does not contribute to the meaning difference. Rather, a la Iatridou et al. (2001), I develop the idea that interpretive differences must be found in the different functional/adverbial projections of the matrix and embedded clauses.