Donald Trump has been planning to abolish the income tax in America for a while now. Most recently, he floated this idea during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast hosted by comedian and veteran podcaster Joe Rogan.
Trump, who was running the presidential race then, revealed his plan of eliminating income taxes, instead depending on revenue generated from tariffs.
When asked by Rogan whether he was “serious” about “getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs,” the then-Republican front-runner said, “Yeah, sure, but why not?” He lambasted companies that moved production operations from the US to other nations, threatening them with huge tariffs.
Donald Trump remarked that he found the word ‘tariff’ to be “more beautiful than ‘love'” and claimed that America could become rich if tariffs were utilized properly. “We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families unless they pay a big price. And the big price is tariffs,” Trump said.
View this post on Instagram
But that wasn’t the first time Donald Trump floated the idea. During a Fox segment, Trump cited policies from the late 19th century as an example of an America without federal taxation. Lauding the policies, Trump said, “It had all tariffs, it didn’t have an income tax. Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”
Dismissing the idea of tariff revenue replacing income tax revenue, Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, said, “It would not be possible to raise tariffs rates high enough to cover anywhere close to that amount (of income tax revenue), as imports would decline as the tariff rates increased.”
View this post on Instagram
Speaking to CNBC at the time, Watson added that Donald Trump’s tariff policies could potentially generate somewhere around $3.8 trillion over 10 years compared with the $33 trillion revenue that income taxes would rake in over the same timeframe. “The math doesn’t work out,” Watson said.
Donald Trump’s plans for tariffs would inevitably result in a surge in prices of consumer goods and in all likelihood would stoke inflation in America. Furthermore, other countries wouldn’t take the tariff hikes laying down and would retaliate with tariffs of their own. This would significantly impact US exporters and would also result in a global trade war.
