Trump floats ending the federal income tax. Here’s what that would mean

By Tami Luhby and Kate Sullivan, CNN

(CNN) — 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.

Speaking with barbers in the Bronx, New York, in a segment aired on Fox News on Monday, Trump said, “There is a way, if what I’m planning comes out.”

“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.

‘Mathematically impossible’

Sweeping tariffs are a cornerstone of Trump’s economic platform for a second term, if he is elected. He has called for an across-the-board tariff of either 10% or 20% on all imports into the US, as well as a tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports.

The former president argues that tariffs, which he imposed to a lesser extent during his first term, would pay for his pricey array of proposals. He has repeatedly denied that American consumers would bear the brunt of the tariffs, inaccurately claiming that foreign countries would pay the levies.

Many federal budget experts, however, have poured cold water on the notion that tariffs could replace income taxes.

“It’s an absurd idea for many reasons, the biggest being that it is mathematically impossible to replace the income tax with tariffs,” Erica York, senior economist and research director at the right-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN. “Imports are a much smaller tax base than taxable income, and there’s no way to squeeze enough revenue from taxing imports to fully replace taxing income. A swap like this would hike taxes on working-class taxpayers and invite harmful retaliation against US exports.”

Increasing tariffs would likely prompt Americans to purchase fewer imported goods, canceling out at least part of the hoped-for revenues, Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, told CNN.

“At first blush, fully replacing $2.4 trillion in income taxes would require a 75% tariff on America’s $3.2 trillion in annual imports,” he said. “However, even that unrealistically assumes that Americans continue purchasing the same imports at nearly double the price.”

What’s more, Trump had to spend part of the revenue raised from the tariffs he imposed in his first term bailing out industries, including agriculture, that were hurt by other nations’ retaliatory actions, Riedl said.

“So even the new revenues from Trump’s next round of tariffs may not provide much net budget savings,” he continued.

Even without eliminating the federal income tax, Trump’s economic package would increase the national debt by $7.5 trillion over a decade, according to a recent analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The nonpartisan watchdog group estimates that his tariffs proposal would bring in $2.7 trillion over 10 years.

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