He most likely intends to pull out the financial pillar of income tax, and replace it with tariffs. He is likely waiting for the price crunch to blow up so he can step in an give everyone the "gift" of no income tax.
If you're an IT professional in the US Government, I would argue you have an obligation as a concerned citizen to make some local backups of the code powering the systems you work on every day and keep them somewhere safe...
I suppose the good news for them then is that if tariffs fail to replace the 20-25% of income tax that would be lost by eliminating income tax on people making under $150k and it has to come from raising taxes on the folks making over $150k it would only be a 25-33% tax increase on them.
People really don't comprehend how much money the top 0.01% makes.
The scam of income tax is that it's progressive on paper but not in practice.
Perfectly put. It's always bothered me that the tax brackets don't continue on in a logarithmic fashion, e.g. new brackets at 1.5 million, 15 million, 150 million, etc.
I don't think stepped-up basis should go away though, otherwise it's just the government getting a second cut of the inflation it causes.
The bigger issue for society is that our equity markets just don't have any real risk of losing your lunch anymore, so these strategies emerge.
(another one in the same vein is that when you donate an appreciated asset, you get a tax deduction of the unrealized value)
That they have to pay back with interest. This made a little sense except for short-term loans when one had liquidity issues when interest rates were close to zero or in very, very limited circumstances where someone knew they were close to death - but that more has to do with the broken way we handle taxing inheritance.
With the prime rate is 7.5% today, it makes far less sense.
> "re-invest" (no profit) into durable assets for their business
Capital expenditures aren't subtracted from revenue. They have no effect on profit.
This is a cheap slight of hand to confuse unsophisticated readers. It has effect on taxable profit since much of cap ex is deductible.
Since when?
Last I checked, capex was not deductible. You can deduct depreciation of assets over time, but that's not going to offset profit to create a loss unless you're spending far more money than you profited (by say, taking out loans).
There is the expiring bonus depreciation provision on a limited limited class of assets which would let you create a loss, but even that's subject to recapture if you sell those assets.
1) taxing consumptions instead of income has the advantage of being much harder to evade. It puts an end to tricks like living off loans or even simply detracting expenses- you cannot detract anything if you're not taxed at all;
2) only taxing imported goods means that anything that benefits the local economy can be purchased tax-free; while imports from abroad become, say, twice as expensive as before. However, you also have a much higher disposable income and, at least at the beginning, no other option.
So the gist of it would be: we levy the same amount of money as before by taxing exclusively consumptions, and we exempt from taxation all domestically produced goods because it's still money reinvested in the economy.
Most of what they pay is capital gains, and usually the long-term rate (15% or 20%, depends), which is lower than all but the lowest two (0%, 12%) of seven brackets applied to people who actually work for a living.
Plus they don't pay FICA on that, which is another ~7.5% for W2 and ~15% for contract workers.
Also, they often manage to avoid even paying the long-term capital gains rate.
Looks like the top marginal rate's about 50% (including the top state rate of ~13%), but that's also way past the point where FICA's dropped off so it's not quite as bad (relative to middle tax brackets) as it looks. I can definitely see turning down ~50% of (say) $2,000 in exchange for a free Saturday if I'm already making north of a quarter-million a year (individual—brackets are higher for joint filing). Hell, when I was a freelancer, for every single vacation I took the main cost was foregone income, so I've even done basically that exact thing, though without being in that high a tax bracket. In fact, even today, I could probably take on paying work many weekends, and never do, so I make the same choice all the time despite being well under the top tax bracket.
Like, working the weekend normally isn't worth it for most people who can possibly afford not to do it, tax bracket be damned. Did these doctors and lawyers work a pretty normal number of hours that week? If so, I don't really understand what you're getting at. Seems like they just wanted to frame a normal thing most people do as a complaint about taxes.
It's almost like it's bullshit.
Trump has openly talked about his plan to replace income tax with tariffs for years. Not just for "earnings under $150k" -- that was some post-facto inventions by Howard "Used Car Salesman" Lutnick on some news program appearance after tariffs were proving spectacularly unpopular -- but Trump has constantly ruminated on the grand old days of the 1890s, at least when he isn't talking about that ol' timey word "groceries" or showerheads, light bulbs and coal. And every economist save a few nuts like Pete Navarro (or his associate Ron Vara) have soundly announced that it's an incredibly stupid plan.
Here in reality, thus far the only tax break offered up has been an extension on tax reductions for the super rich. No tax free tips, overtime, etc. Only the super rich have benefitted.
Further, it economically makes zero sense and Trump has repeatedly argued completely contrary "wins" from his tariffs: both that all of the manufacturing and other production will return to the US (ignore that the US has effectively full employment, and such would be massively inflationary without a dire reduction in US quality of life), yet somehow he's going to make trillions from tariffs, which would require such an egregious tariff rate that there would be no imports at all and thus no tariff income. Federal spending would have to drop by almost 80% for tariff funding of the government to be remotely rational, and that means demolishing the military and social security.
>so he can step in an give everyone the "gift" of no income tax
Yeah, that isn't at all how Trump operates. Much like DOGE and their hilarious "$5000 cheques for all the savings" that will never, ever happen -- and quite the contrary the government financial position is more dire than ever -- Trump makes all of his promises up front. Like his tips and overtime tax claims, both of which are never going to happen. Or his amazing healthcare plan that's coming in two weeks. Or how about that line of countries offering everything and their 90 deals in 90 days. This guy is the definition of overpromising and underdelivering.
There is zero scenario where tariffs even cover the current deficit. And as Trump demolishes the credibility of the USD and US TBills (people don't realize that US banks have been increasingly forced to buy these as the global market as dissolved), it's going to get drastically worse.
Getting rid of income tax will require legislation from congress. If we're in the midst of a tariff induced recession, what are the chances his party keeps congress in '26?
Also, remember when the British government tried to pass a massive tax cut funded with debt? Remember how that went down? The chances of the US being able to get rid of income tax in the next 4 years is basically zero.
Their chances will maybe be higher, if they cut income taxes.
All it'll cost is moving our already-nigh-inevitable debt crisis a few decades closer to today.
> Also, remember when the British government tried to pass a massive tax cut funded with debt?
Both Republican administrations this millennium have done exactly that. I see no reason to expect they won't do it again.
The optics of Democrats voting against a full tax cut for those earning less than $150K would be interesting to say the least.