Trump Continues To Push Idea Of Replacing Income Tax With Tariffs

These guys are just such assholes.
How sick do you have to be to shift all the burden on to the people that have the least?

It's the main tentpole of Project 2025.

This is like backwards georgism. The fash dream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Trump got caught knowing nothing about tariff's when on a finance news show. Trump said to the interview guy "No! You know nothing about tariff's!". Since then he has gone all in on the tariff's he knows nothing about because he does not want to admit he was a fool.
- No at this point it's so we'll known that Peter Navarro just lied and created fake experts to make his bullshit tariff theories seem more sane.

Now I'm no economician, but isn't this like saying "we'll replace writing class with origami class?"
- No, replacing income tax with tariffs isn't basically the same thing. It's worse. It is replacing a progressive tax (one that is easiest on lower wage earners and gets higher with income levels) to a regressive tax (one that more greatly effects lower wage earners than higher) because lower wage earners have to spend most or all of their income for survival, while high income earners regularly use their surplus money for things unaffected by tariffs, like investments, property, travel, etc.
  
  Is it regressive though? Multimillionaires don't pay income taxes at all, they have no income. Elon musk isn't sitting down in April to fill out a 1040 or a 1099. They pay capital gains and other rich people taxes. With a consumption tax like a tarriff they'd at least be paying something even if it's a lower percentage of their wealth than yours or mine.
- It's more like Trump saying "we'll replace taxes on me with taxes on you."

Of course he would. It would be a massive shift of taxation towards the middle class and especially the lower classes, and on top of that, he personally gets to decide who gets to pay and who doesn't; how much and when, and especially why or why not.
- On top of the continual shift of taxation towards the middle and lower classes we’ve had since Reagan.
  The “good old days”the Republicans want to go back to were only good in the sense that the top tax rate was 90% and the rich paid something much closer to their fair share, and the middle class was able to actually have comfortable lives. But they want everyone other than them to be on the brink of economic ruin at all times so that they are more easily controlled.
  
  Absolutely. It's as if they had declared that life in America was much better in the 50s, and the lesson they learned was that it wasn't possibly because of the economic policies of the post-war era, but because of the bigotry and racism and xenophobia.

So it is a tax on the people with out any representation. Seems like there was something like this in the past the North Americans dealt with
- Time to start throwing big macs in the harbor?
  
  At least the tea was biodegradable.

This is like the $5,000 stimulus checks Elon talked about and that "concept of a plan" from 2016. He knows his base doesn't want to pay taxes, so if he references the possibility to get rid of them, they will keep holding on and later he can just blame the libs for it never happening.
- Sadly, the "concept of a plan" line was from last year. :/

I almost say do it, triple-double-multiplier tariff added on everything! From water to bathroom visits to minutes of watched television, sodas to butter, corn to newspapers, even icecubes must not escape tariffs to make the country great again...
Then I give it 6 months, after which I suspect personal hells will open up...
Say, what about sales taxes eh? Seems those remain, hmm, so it's actually a tariff on top of taxes?
- Sales taxes are state/city level taxes, there are no federal sales taxes (yet). But he is essentially using the tariffs as a way to enact sales taxes without really adding a sales tax.
  With the tariffs he can add a massive tax on the people which Republicans would normally be very much against, but he can say it is about being pro American and most of them forget about all of the extra money they will be paying.
  This shifts the tax burden further onto middle/lower income homes and lets him give more income tax cuts to higher earners without increasing the deficit so much that congress would turn on him.
  The Republicans have actually been talking about this for a long time they called it the "fair tax". Their fair tax plan was basically a flat ~23% federal sales tax that would replace income tax, but they could never get their base behind it.
  Someone on Trump's team realized that we buy so much from other countries that he could accomplish the same thing the fair tax aimed to do via tariffs while selling them to his party as "buy American". His lower/middle income base eats that up, and his campaign donors see it as killing their overseas competition.
  If it weren't for the other countries reciprocating it would have been a good plan for them.
  
  Sales taxes are state/city level taxes
  Many other countries have them at the national level too.

You know the last time tariffs got out of control here we threw some tea in the bay.
- This time it’ll be teslas. Teaslas?
  
  Tesler
  
  I like the idea!

I'd rather have it replaced with a sovereign wealth fund or something ngl.
- I'd rather have it replaced with a sovereign wealth fund…
  I'd rather not have it replaced with a ~~sovereign wealth~~ trump slush fund
  The reason that sovereign wealth funds have cropped up recently in discussions is that trump really, really wants to have an unaccountable slush fund like his authoritarian buddies.
  It makes like zero sense for a country like the US
- Those are for nations running a surplus, not a deficit.
  
  Patently false.
  Any nation can have a sovereign wealth fund, Australia has a sovereign wealth fund and they have national debt, hell even in America there are states with a sovereign wealth fund, even Alaska with their massive deficits and if your referring to Norway, they had national debt until the discovered oil and they created their fund with oil taxes.
  
  ik, but hypothetically, why would a surplus be needed?