After promising to eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay, former President Donald Trump is taking aim at the largest levy of them all — the federal income tax.
With Election Day around the corner, Trump talked about his interest in ending the federal income tax in two high-profile interviews this week, harking back to the late 19th century, when the US relied on tariffs to fund federal spending. The former president has vowed to broadly impose tariffs, arguing they can generate trillions of dollars in revenue.
“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s … this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said after a barber asked whether it would be possible to jettison the federal 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.”
A few days later, podcaster Joe Rogan asked Trump whether he was serious about replacing federal income taxes with tariffs.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Trump said during his interview Friday on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
Trump, who also floated the idea of ending the federal income tax in June, has not said whether he would eliminate federal corporate income and payroll taxes or just the individual income tax — which raises about half of the nearly $5 trillion in revenue that the federal government collects.
By contrast, tariffs bring in about 2% of federal revenue.
Eliminating the income tax could be a future “aspirational goal,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters Saturday, noting that the former president’s top priorities would be extending the expiring provisions of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and implementing the targeted tax cuts that Trump has rolled out.
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