Trump floats eliminating U.S. income tax and replacing it with tariffs on imports
Trump floats eliminating U.S. income tax and replacing it with tariffs on imports
This basically eliminates almost all taxes on the rich, burdens middle and lower class with higher prices, and blows up budget deficit.
So much for FiScAL ReSPonSibiLiTY
Yeah, are you being fiscally responsible, chump? How much are you making? Jeff over here needs another yacht!
The real rich don’t pay any income tax tho? Not sure what you mean. Sure the high-income developers and engineers and lawyers etc. would become a richer, but they are not the rich, are they? The owners of the businesses they work at are. And they don’t pay income taxes.
In the USA in 2021, the top 1% of earners payed 26.3% of federal income from taxes, $3,872,395,000,000 Total. The top 50% of earners payed 89.6% of income taxes.
You could argue that the "true" rich people weren't earners because they took out loans against their stocks and properties, but they're either going to sell or die sometime and that has been true for centuries. However, Elon Musk for example won't make your list if that's how you measure it because he did sell and he paid billions in taxes.
This freak lost a fucking Casino. The place where people just give you their money. A CASINO!!! He is an idiot and the worst "business man". Con man looking for a new con.
Not a casino. Multiple ones. Because the dumb fuck decided the best way to run resorts was to have them compete and under cut each other.
Are you suggesting that Convicted Felon and Sex Offender Treason Trump is not a very stable genius?
That would be... Correct!
Tarrifs on imports?
So basically jacking up prices on all the things made overseas that are cheapest to buy in the US. That affects everyone, especially the poorer people that tend to shop places where that cheap imported stuff is sold because it’s a bigger percentage of their income. It’s gonna affect the middle class the most because they’re probably the biggest consumers. The rich DGAF because well, they’re rich.
Quickest way to put even more people below the poverty line.
things made overseas that are cheapest to buy in the US
Things that are made overseas because American business owners outsourced the manufacturing jobs to the countries with the cheapest labour (and also the least worker protections)?
It's becoming a problem for Americans because labor leverage abroad (particularly in China and India) have been improving as labor demand eclipses supply.
African and Latin American states (particularly Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa) were supposed to be the next places to extract labor, but they keep going Woke, with socialist state governments making demands on exports that Western states don't want to surrender.
Imperials are running out of countries to exploit.
That affects everyone, especially the poorer people
That's a consequence of outsourcing as much as anything. Tariffs don't have to mean making retail goods unaffordable for the bulk of the population. When you have domestic industry with room to grow, insourcing your demand can simply mean building out more capital and consuming more labor at home.
But insourcing also means boosting wages and incentivizing immigration, things conservatives hate.
So Trump's pitch ultimately amounts to giving domestic producers with no intention of boosting production an opportunity to price gouge their clients with the blessing of the state.
Your assumption that things become unaffordable is incorrect, they just cost more.
Prove that wages get boosted. That flies in the face of corporate methodology to cheapen wages and benefits along with product quality in the service of quarterly reports and profits.
Price gouging is already happening. It doesn’t require trump’s ok to allow it.
Nailed it.
Plus rich people can better afford quality stuff made in the USA.
This is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.
I'm sure he'll come up with something dumber tomorrow.
Income tax is such a removed to deal with. I used to support the idea of replacing it with GST/VAT because then I'd not have to deal with it. But then someone pointed out that disproportionately benefits the rich (who mostly just hold wealth rather than spend it) and disadvantages the poor (who cannot avoid paying for things).
So fuck it. Make it all income tax and get rid of the others! :P
(In before this is also a bad idea somehow)
It should be a moderately progressive income tax. That is to say the lowest earning bracket should pay nothing as a percentage of their income, the next bracket should pay a little bit, the next bracket a little higher % of their income, all the way up to billionaires who should be taxed out of billionaire status. I can certainly afford to pay a higher % of my income to taxes than someone who isn't sure where their next meal is coming from, but my bosses and their bosses, and the people who own the building should be paying way more on their income than me. Also we need to get rid of the shenanigans that allows the ultra wealthy to avoid income tax altogether through loans and what not.
For clarity, say Kalkaline earns 100k a year. Ideally the billionaires would bring home exactly the same on their first 100k as Kalkaline does.
Marginal tax rate means the higher tax brackets only tax you in the money made above a certain amount. And it's the same for the next higher up tax bracket, which doesn't apply to any lower money.
If you're not getting welfare, there is no "next tax bracket" that's going to make you bring home less when earning more. That's not a thing.
If you get a bonus, that might be taxed withheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you "getting" $800.)
We could put an 80% marginal tax rate on incomes above a billion dollars, and it wouldn't really touch someone who was only bringing home 1,030 million dollars a year.
I’d prefer a 70% tax on billionaires, but I’d settle for 50% for anything above 5million. Take Elon for example, the guy makes an estimated $50,000USD per minute. Yes folks, the guy makes more per minute than the average American does in a year.
prove to me that billionaires should exist. Tax them accordingly.
It's the most practical tax idea I've heard in forty years, tbh.
Heard about the Land Value Tax 41 years ago, huh?
It's the least practical tax idea I've heard in forty years.
Taxes usually start out simple, since that appeals to people. Then over time they get more complicated as people discover more and more edge cases to exploit.
If you make it all income tax, well, what counts as "income"? Elon Musk just got "paid" $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla, for example. But it's not actually 46 billion dollars. It's a share in ownership of a company. Those shares can't actually be sold for 46 billion dollars. Trying to sell them would cause their price to drop. He can't actually sell them at all right away, for that matter - they're restricted stock. He has to hold on to them for a while, as incentive to keep doing a good job as CEO.
So if he keeps doing a good job as CEO and the stock goes up in value by 10 billion dollars, was that rise in value income? What if it goes down by 10 billion instead?
This stuff is inherently complicated. I'm not sure that any simple tax system is going to work.
Elon Musk just got "paid" $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla.
He should have to pay income tax on the value of the stock on the day he "took possession" of it.
In 3 years, he says something on Twitter to pump the stock, and dumps a lot of it. He should have to pay tax (capital gains?) on the additional value of the stock that he sells.
If the value goes down and he sells it, it's a deduction.
I don’t know if this isn’t already a thing, but if he uses that stock as collateral to overpay for another social media company, or some other stupid flex, he should be taxed on that valuation with no deductions whatsoever.
No that's about right. The big problem we have right now is we've lost the ability to effectively tax people who don't live on an "income". So we need a second system for people who are insanely wealthy.
Be mad that income tax is unnecessarily difficult to deal with. As has been pointed out by others online a lot recently, the US makes personal income taxes hard, where other countries you can fill it out in minutes if you have no deductions, and less than an hour if you do (and have kept good records).
No one likes paying taxes (usually) but since the process is so painless I don't hear people complaining about income tax that much (outside of the right-wing media in my country, Australia)
Jesus Christ, we learned that fixing the economy via tariffs was bad in 1930. Like holy shit, tariffs are nearly universally agree by every field of economics to be shitty for citizens, businesses, and then the country. It makes no one inside want to buy anything but the simple basics, even with the basics now costing much much more.
I am not a "free trade" person, but this is not how you "Make America Great Again". Even Ronald Reagan and Dubya didn't do tariffs as a replacement for other things.
That's not how anything works. The country exporting to the USA don't field the tariffs expense. The importers do.
He would just be removing taxes for people like himself to the result of a massive deficit and decreased trade.
I hate Trump, and maybe that's what he's thinking.
But I'm not sure replacing taxes with tariffs won't help; replacing sales taxes with teriffs will mean that domestic products are effectively being subsidized by people buying imported products. This increases demand for domestic products, hopefully stimulation domestic production.
I think the tell isn't that he is using teriffs, it's that he wants to cut income taxes at the expense of people buying foreign products.
The USA mainly sells Financial Services and Machinery. Making our own rubber ducks and flatpack furniture would be analogous to a lawyer painting his house when he could have made enough money to pay somebody else to paint it 5x over.
Unfortunately, much of our raw materials are imports so by disincentivizing other countries to trade with us we are killing our own manufacturing capabilities. That is exactly what happened when Trump era steel tariffs killed a large sector of American manufacturing. And he explicitly excluded Russian Steel where his good friend Aaron Abromovich was offering to supply steel for his stupid wall, until congress twisted his arm into signing the additional tariffs against Russia, just another example of how his actions are purely selfish.
At the end of the day, trade is both good and conditional. Other nations might see these actions as hostile and reduce the number of goods they're willing to sell, as they can't be the ones left holding the bag if trade suddenly stops one day and they've overproduced specialty goods with no use so reducing production is the clear choice, and there is less incentive to offer other less profitable goods as per trade agreements and less incentive to even make new trade agreements in the first place.
You cannot force American CEOs to want to produce goods in the states anymore than you can convince Chinese people to live in the districts where excess homes were built: governments do not have enough control to dictate the markets via anything but positive reinforcement.
So he's planning to make the poor pay the taxes for the rich.
No, poor people already pay for the rich. The rich can afford an accountant to find as many loopholes and deductions as possible. The really rich don’t have an “income” and live of capital gains which is already under taxed.
This is just a hope people remember the “no income tax” part and forget about the “raise import tariffs” part when they’re at the ballot.
Always has been
So become 100% dependent on foreign trade... thats a stupid thing to do when conflict is potentially right around the corner
More getting other countries to pay for things I see. The hubris I swear.
Other countries don't pay tariffs, people who buy the products do. So regular people.
Rich people pay people to design a product, without having to pay their employees income tax> send it overseas to be built > when the product comes back all the consumers pay a ridiculous amount for necessities because the cost of the terrif is absorbed into the price of the product. In the long run, consumers pay the tax in a different form, but the wealthy don't have to pay that chunk that the employer matches.
He only can get one more term, so I suppose he can promise whatever at this point. It's not like he's got credibility consequences for lack of follow through at this point.
The swing states and their votes are:
Nevada (6), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (15), Pennsylvania (19), and Georgia (16).
He needs 38 electoral votes out of that.
Michigan+Pennsylvania+Wisconsin would do it on their own, and they're all Rust Belt states, so I figure that promising protectionist policy on manufacturing is probably gonna sell well there.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/pennsylvania/
He only can get one more term
I'll just leave these here:
It's not like he's got credibility consequences for lack of follow through at this point.
Implying there was ever a point where this wasn't true.
That is his dream for everything, it's how he lives his sham life. And it causes a lot of issues along the way but what does he care, he has a jet and his name on a skyscraper.
Look at this graph, when you know, then you know. Fuck all this distraction from the actual problem, orange man is a distraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax_in_the_United_States
Makes sense that profits went up, since this graph is not inflation adjusted
Tax the rich, give the middle and lower class tax breaks. It would fix so much.
I mean, the Brownback Experiment nearly broke Kansas, but what if we scaled it up to 50 states?
It might just work! /s
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
And probably didn't take into account that actually the tariff would need to be even higher since imports would drop drastically from the current amount.
I believe 130% was the conservative estimate.
Eat the rich. Tax the motherfuckers.
Oh yes! /c/eattherich@kbin.social
Trump floats more shit than a sewage treatment plant.
How about we eliminate income taxes and replace it with corporate carbon emissions tax, AND cut fuel subsidies.
Horrible idea from a horrible orange blob.
MAKE INFLATION GREAT AGAIN
See this is the kind of thing that makes zero actual sense but his supporters pretend to believe he can accomplish it or worse they actually believe him.
How much can a banana cost Michael, $1000?
They'd have to be enforced to be effective.
Who made his gold-painted shoes?
The price of computers and TVs would skyrocket—making the tariffs regressive taxes—though it might also spur repair and re-use.
I swear he comes across as even more senile each and every day. But ...
The rich would support this - they can only consume so much after all, and most of that would be discretionary. No more income taxes on vast incomes, stop buying imported shit, huge win for them. The chowderheads supporting Drumpf would probably be enthusiastic about such an idea too - imagining their small paychecks without that hated tax deduction box and imagining no more paying every year for that scary tax return software. And then, they lose their jobs because countries that we export to retaliate with their own tariffs. Prices on pretty much everything goes through the roof (because even domestic products have foreign supply chains), and most of the cheap shit they used to be able to afford (like electronics from China, bulk foods from overseas and (fast-)foods made with it) they can't afford now.
Meanwhile, with the economy crashing, federal receipts (both tax and tariffs) dry up and it's Government Shutdown time. All working according to the Plan. Grandma and Grandpa lose their incomes and health care and have to move in with unemployed, impoverished JimBob and the wife, which is darn near intolerable what with all the hillbilly kids being home all the time now that the schools have been shut down. Kids that are wailing about being hungry all the time just like the oldsters.
It would be fun to see what carve-outs to the tax/tariff policy they'd have, to try to keep the MIC funded. Borrowing is of course the preferred way to fund it, but nobody's going to be touching the bonds issued by an actively collapsing national government.
People are so fucking stupid. This man will further ruin the United States. Not even attempting to maintain it.
This is the same economic genius that said if the US wanted to default on the national debt, we could and then we could just renegotiate what we owed like some chump who bankrupted their own casino.
And he will do it.
He has to figure out this thing with a boat, a shark, and a battery...
But once he works that one out, China will be paying our taxes.
Jesus Christ. Why is it that republicans think destroying the country will be better than what we currently have? It's so fucking insane.
Because it will be better FOR THEM only
Now look at this in the context of increasing domestic production, so we'd be importing less even before increasing tariffs. Revenue will hit rock bottom in record time.
Take a look at the JOLTS data
516k job openings in April, 385k separations and 382k hires. That's a deficit of about 100k jobs that aren't being filled in manufacturing alone. The problem isn't a lack of manufacturing jobs, in fact it's the opposite. We have over a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs we can't fill, and this matches what I hear through the grapevine at my work which does contract industrial cleaning. People don't want those jobs, and people take advantage of the opportunities available to them to get out of those jobs. Trump would destroy the countries economy if he actually managed to implement this plan
There's a quote from Arthur Harris that I think shows a pretty fundamental insight into the mind of a fascist.
"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them."
Someone like Trump just does not think, "And then what will they do when we triple our tariffs on their goods." It's an innate narcissism, the belief that everyone else exists to do things to and not to have agency of their own.
This isn't even getting into the reality that this is just another regressive tax scheme designed to shift even more of the tax burden onto the working class.
I'll credit Trump for one thing - he successfully broke me of my Scotch habit with his stupid tariffs
Now let's scale that up to, well, everything?
You didn't hear this from me but there's American whiskey distillers trying to make American Whisky the same way. American peat, malts, etc...
He'd just do it temporarily for us poors but make it permanent for his best friends rich donors and make it very hard to ever tax them again.
Is there an infographic about this I can give to my maga relatives when they inevitably bring this up, so I don't actually have to talk about it with them?
I think he might be trying to destroy America
The Axis of Evil
Treason Trump - War Criminal Putin - Caligula Jung Un - Comrade XI
The US tax rate is very similar to other nations, the only difference is what we spend our tax money on. Most rational nations spend their tax money on their citizens. The US spends it on other poor countries citizens, but not in the way you are thinking. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bury Palestinians under rubble. Hundreds of billions to cover Yemen people alive while they sleep. Meanwhile, school teachers in America have classes over 30 students and have to buy their own school supplies.
This is such a gloriously uninformed opinion. The benefits to the US from being a global superpower are staggering, investing a million dollars in shutting down the Houthi attacks on merchant ships or whatever returns hundreds of millions of investment back to the US by way of trade (also, they are "spending" that money on the wages of nationals, it's not leaving the country). The Israeli Hamas is a proxy war with Iran, it's unethical and utterly immoral, but to argue that it's costing the US money is flawed.
There are real areas us spending is bad, the fact that the US spends over 17% of gdp on healthcare when other countries like Australia spend less than 11% does mean that Americans are spending too much money on healthcare (and literally getting shit for it), but it still doesn't mean that they are destroying 6% of GDP.
Well, worked everytime someone did this in the past ... not!
Like the tariffs of old.
I'd love to see some way for this to encourage domestic production.
However, that wouldn't work. Most of the bullshit we buy would still come from China or some third world country. And it's not like the businesses importing the product would pay the tariffs themselves; they'd immediately tack the cost onto the retail price. They pass the pain into consumers and we get fucked instead of the multinational corporations.
I am sick of free trade being stifled.. Whoever makes the best product should get the money having the products I buy dictated to me is unamerican
Someone explain to me how this would benefit the rich. The rich don’t pay income tax.
Great idea but it's bullshit that this could ever be implemented.
It's not a great idea. It would make the US a walled garden as all our exports become harshly taxed by the rest of the world. The country wouldn't collapse but our standard of living, education, and healthcare would drop precipitously.
This is absolutely going to get him votes. If he does it, is another thing entirely.
There are between 8 to 10 million Americans that don't live in the US. Every penny they make is taxed to Uncle Sam even if they don't step foot in the country their entire life.
It is universally hated. And the only other country stupid enough to do this is Eritrea.
You know how you get 8 million votes? Drop income tax. That doesn't even count all the red state domestic Americans who also don't want taxes (but don't understand tarrifs and therefore local pricing).
If he campaigns on this, versus just saying it one time, he will absolutely 100% win.
This is not true. Most countries have a taxation agreement with the US which excludes a significant portion of income and/or taxes paid from US income. You do still pay taxes to the US on foreign income, but not on every penny.
Every penny they make is taxed to Uncle Sam
There is no where near a 100% income tax rate LMFAO. Obviously nonsense claims do not make a good argument.
If he campaigns on this,
MAKE INFLATION GREAT AGAIN
It's somewhat accurate to say "every penny they make is taxABLE to Uncle Sam" which is different from saying 100% tax rate. Americans living outside the US still need to file a tax return and report all their income, and pay tax on it to the US, even if it is from a foreign source. That said they could claim the foreign tax credit if they paid tax to a foreign regime on that income already, or the foreign income exclusion under some circumstances which would reduce their taxable income to the US.
I don't really understand your point.
What about the other n million Americans who pay income tax? They might find it appealing too.
The 10 million living outside the US would pay less american income tax than residents.
You have a dead heat match. A few votes matter. This is millions of extra votes.
Many Americans outside the country pay more than Americans inside the country as they tend to be more affluent so higher income tax bracket. Yet not UHNW so it's all capital gains.