CNN
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After promising to remove taxes on advice, Social security benefits And overtime payformer president Donald Trump targets the most important levy of all: the federal income tax.

As Election Day approaches, Trump spoke about his interest in ending the federal income tax in two high-profile interviews this week, recalling the late 19th century, when the United States relied on tariffs customs authorities to finance federal spending. The former president pledged to impose tariffsarguing that they can generate billions of dollars in revenue.

Talk with barbers in the Bronx, New York, In a segment that aired Monday on Fox News, Trump said, “There is a way, if what I’m planning comes to pass.” »

“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s…that’s when the country was relatively the richest it had ever been. There were all the prices. There was no income tax,” Trump said after a barber asked him if it would be possible to ditch the federal income tax. “Now we have income taxes and people are dying. They pay taxes and have no money to pay them. »

A few days later, podcaster Joe Rogan asked Trump if he was seriously considering replacing the federal income tax with tariffs.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Trump said during his interview on Friday on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Trump, who also floated the idea of ​​ending the federal income tax in June, did not say whether he would eliminate federal corporate income and payroll taxes or just the income tax. personal income – which brings in about half of the nearly $5 trillion in federal tax revenue. the government collects.

On the other hand, customs duties represent approximately 2% of federal revenues.

Eliminating the income tax could be a future “ambitious goal,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters Saturday, noting that the former president’s top priority would be to extend the tax. income tax. expired provisions of its Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and implementing the targeted tax cuts that Trump deployed.

Drastic tariffs are the cornerstone of Trump’s economic agenda for a second term, if elected. He called for an across-the-board tariff of 10% or 20% on all imports into the United States, as well as a tariff greater than 10% or 20% on all imports into the United States. 60% on all Chinese imports.

The former president claims that the customs tariffs, which he imposed to a lesser extent during his first termwould pay for his expensive range of proposals. He repeatedly denied that American consumers would bear the weight of the tariffs, falsely pretending that foreign countries would pay the levies.

Many federal budget experts, however, have refuted the idea that tariffs could replace income taxes.

“This is an absurd idea for many reasons, the most important of which is that it is mathematically impossible to replace income taxes with tariffs,” Erica York, senior economist and research director, told CNN to the right-wing Tax Foundation. “Imports represent a much smaller tax base than taxable income, and there is no way to raise enough revenue from import taxation to fully replace income taxation. A trade like this would raise taxes on working-class taxpayers and result in harmful retaliation against U.S. exports.”

An increase in tariffs would likely cause Americans to buy fewer imported goods, negating at least some of the hoped-for revenue, Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, told CNN.

“On its face, fully replacing the $2.4 trillion in income taxes would require a 75% tariff on the United States’ $3.2 trillion in annual imports,” he said . “However, even this assumes, unrealistically, that Americans continue to buy the same imports at almost double the price.”

Additionally, Trump had to dedicate part of the revenue generated by the tariffs he imposed during his first term to bailing out industries, including agriculturewho were affected by retaliation from other countries, Riedl said.

“So even the new revenue from Trump’s next round of tariffs may not generate large net budget savings,” he continued.

Even without eliminating the federal income tax, Trump’s economic plan increase the national debt of $7.5 trillion over a decade, according to a recent analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The nonpartisan watchdog group estimates its tariff proposal would raise $2.7 trillion over 10 years.