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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I could get potentially get behind this one:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/25/a...

"To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service"

Note: 36 co-sponsors, but this has no chance of making it into law either.

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"Finally, the bill terminates the national sales tax if the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (authorizing an income tax) is not repealed within seven years after the enactment of this bill."

So if the 16th isn't repealed, and the IRS no longer exists... does the US just stop functioning in 2024?

So... How does the fed continue to function?

It wouldn't, which would be the entire point.

Reduce government to the size that it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub, as Grover Norquist eloquently put it, letting state governments and private interests fill the power vacuum.

Yeah, who needs interstates, foreign relations, and minority protections anyway?

Any authority not explicitly granted by the US Constitution to the Federal government lies first with the people, and second with the states. The Federal government is supposed to be the weakest and least privileged by design.

That may not be the most humane, egalitarian or efficient way to run a country at the scale of the US, but to many people that is the way it's supposed to work.

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