Where Is Trump’s Plan To Cut Spending?
During a town hall event at a barbershop in the Bronx—yes, really—this week, former President Donald Trump was asked about the possibility of eliminating the federal income tax.
How he answered revealed something about how Trump understands fiscal policy—and something important about what he doesn’t, despite having spent nine years either campaigning for the president or sitting in the White House.
The question is a bit of a random one for a presidential candidate to field, but it’s a sensible thing to ask since Trump has spent months promising to exempt various types of income—including tips and Social Security payments—from federal income tax. So why not just eliminate the federal income tax altogether?
Trump seemed to take the idea at least semi-seriously. “In the old days…in the 1890s,” Trump said, “[the United States] had all tariffs—it didn’t have an income tax.”
“We have people that are dying, they’re paying tax and they don’t have the money to pay the tax,” Trump continued.
On this point, Trump is directionally correct. The income tax sucks! It is a real burden that creates a disincentive to work and unfairly robs productive Americans of their earnings. And Trump is right that there was a time when the country didn’t have an income tax. A temporary one was imposed during the Civil War, but the income tax as we know it today was created after the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913.
This isn’t the first time Trump has mentioned the 1890s as a model for American fiscal policy, as The New York Times noted on Thursday, and some of the nationalist conservatives who support his campaign also seem to have a fondness for the era when tariffs were the primary means of funding the (much smaller) federal government.
But there are two sides to fiscal policy: revenue and spending. Of the two, the spending side—which indicates the “true tax,” as Milton Friedman famously put it—is the more important.
Put another way: If you want to fund the government at 1890s levels, and using 1890s methods, you have t
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