The Morning Briefing: Fantasy Politics — Trump Takes Aim at the Federal Income Tax

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Yazwina had a preternatural gift for pairing offbeat neuroses with snacks in a vending machine.

We will get to the reality of the situation in a paragraph or two. Let's just take a few seconds at the top here to indulge the dream of an alternative universe United States of America where there is no federal income tax.

A nice thoughts go, that's one of the nicer ones.

From this voter's perspective, President Trump has hit all of the right notes to begin this term in office. I feel well represented by a politician in this representative republic for the first time in a long time. As I've mentioned a couple of times to my "Five O'Clock Somewhere" partner in thought-crime Stephen Green, our new president has begun by dealing with all of the things I wanted dealt with first. I couldn't imagine it getting any better.

Until it did.

In a speech on Monday, Trump came up with his greatest justification for tariffs yet — their potential to get the federal income tax monkey off of our backs, which Matt wrote about:

“We had no income tax,” Trump pointed out. “The income tax came in in 1913.”
The historical success of tariffs led Trump to propose a radical shift in economic policy. He argued, "As I said in my speech last week, instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens. Does that make sense? Right."

RIGHT.

Getting from Point A to Point B on this is a bit of a chore, of course. It isn't easy to repeal a constitutional amendment. One might think that the federal income tax would be a no-brainer as a common enemy for people of all political persuasions. The Dems have been using the euphemism "revenue" for "taxes" for so long that any righteous anger they may once have had has been dulled. Let's be honest with ourselves here — if even one third of the voting population had much anger over the income tax, we'd already have had a tax revolt.

There's also the fact that taxation (at any level) is the heart and dark soul of the Democrats' worldview. Trump is threatening their Precious when he talks about making the federal income tax pull a Houdini. Should Trump or anyone else ever start making serious moves to get the 16th Amendment repealed, the tax-loving Dems are sure to find ways of resistance even they haven't yet thought of.

Matt says in his post that this is "a call to action." Who knows? Maybe now is a perfect time to float the most radical of propositions. As I wrote yesterday, Trump has a lot of political capital to spend. We all know that he could be the one to get something done that most people view as nigh on impossible.

Possibility — that's what Trump brings to the American people in everything he does as president now. This is why I love that he goes off on tangents. I never know what gem of an idea he might bump into when he goes off-script. Once he says something aloud, people should take him seriously, no matter how fantastical the idea is.

So let's dream about getting rid of the federal income tax and using the tariff windfall to buy Greenland.

I wonder if this is how Trump had it on his vision board.

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