https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/27/art-of-the-deal-trading-the-income-tax-for-tariffs/
While speaking Saturday in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump suggested, as he had during the 2024 campaign, replacing the federal income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. We don’t need to see an economic analysis to believe this is debate worth having. Of all the good Trump could do as president in the next four years, eliminating the federal income tax would be one of his greatest achievements.
“If the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen, if you want to know the truth,” he said.
Trump also reminded the fussbudgets and change-fearing conventionalists who will predict that without a federal income tax the country will fall into a decline that until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, there was no federal income tax. That’s right, establishing a federal income tax required a change to the Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1895 struck down an effort in the year before to establish a national income tax. It was, said five justices, unconstitutional.
An income tax at any level is insidious. Internal taxes, Thomas Jefferson said, were an assault on liberty, which “covered our land with officers and opened our doors to their intrusions.”
“Jefferson would be horrified by the power of today’s IRS to break down our doors and seize our property, and he surely would have led a revolt on seeing the powers added to the IRS under Obamacare,” the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards wrote nearly a full decade before the Biden administration and the Democrat Congress weaponized the IRS with a plan to add 87,000 new agents.
The federal income is an economic assassin. According to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Americans burned more than 7.9 billion of their hours last year complying with IRS filing and reporting requirements.
