Trump aims to eliminate income tax by end of term

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/28/trump-tariffs-income-taxes

by hereme888 • 8 months ago

11 16 8 months ago

bpavuk• 8 months ago

a link without loginwall: https://archive.is/1gzFE

This would certainly have impacts. Title gore on hn here though, this is almost certainly not going to happen and “Trump says” is an important qualifier.

TheCleric2• 8 months ago

Yeah my first reaction was “No they aren’t. That’s not going to happen.” and then I saw the actual headline and said “Ah, that makes sense.”

hereme888• 8 months ago

Changed title to make it clearer

al2o3cr• 8 months ago

Yeah, and monkeys may fly out of my butt

xenospn• 8 months ago

No way!

treetalker• 8 months ago

Sha!

Bender2• 8 months ago

Just a guess on my part but I would say that if I was trying to keep the population from selling assets and yanking investments if I knew I was about to do something that could shake confidence in the market.

lawlessone2• 8 months ago

if I knew I was about to do something that could shake confidence in the market.

He does something like that every week.

Bender2• 8 months ago

He does something like that every week.

So if I am right that would mean there may be something gnarly in the pipeline by contrast.

kylehotchkiss• 8 months ago

Sounds inflationary!

pfannkuchen• 8 months ago

Well if the prices rise due to tariffs, and then more money is released via income tax reductions, the two effects may offset each other from the perspective of the consumer.

Prices would rise, but the money available to the consumer would also increase. So I think it wouldn’t be the kind of inflation we usually see where prices rises but earnings don’t keep up.

Wealthy people don’t pay much income tax anyway, so the effect on asset prices would not be huge probably. The middle class would have more money to spend on housing, which would increase housing prices if middle class spending was dominating housing prices, but with investor housing purchases being such a large component of house purchasing buyer pool it may mostly just shift who is buying houses over to the middle class a bit (due to available money increase going disproportionately to middle class people who actually have their spending power substantially eroded by income tax).

Note that when I say wealthy people I mean independently wealthy, not high W2 earners, they aren’t wealthy IMO if their W2 job still generates most of their buying power.

TheCleric2• 8 months ago

I’m no economist but this seems like it would cause the government to now have conflicting priorities. The whole stated purpose of the tariffs were to boost domestic production.

But now if this were done, the US government would need less or the same domestic production to ensure the coffers are filled. If, by some magic wand, this passes and domestic production can meet all of our supply needs, what then?

stevenalowe• 8 months ago

First paragraph puts the mail in the coffin of this idea:

“Offsetting the revenue from individual income taxes would require over $2.5 trillion a year in tariff collections, more than 10 times what the government actually took in during the last fiscal year”

keernan• 8 months ago

SCOTUS has yet to rule on whether the Trump tariffs are a revenue-raising alternative to income taxes, rendering them an unconstitutional intrusion into the exclusive power of Congress; or regulatory tools for foreign affairs, which would bring them within the power of the Executive Branch...

...seemingly an odd time for Trump to make the statement that income taxes could be eliminated soon due to tariffs.

Trump aims to eliminate income tax by end of term

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