Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.

It’s official: Donald Trump wants to abolish the income tax.

In a much-anticipated interview with Joe Rogan on his podcast, Trump said the country should return to the late 19th century when we had no income tax at all and funded the federal government with tariffs.

Now for months, the former president has been making it clear that he really doesn’t like the income tax, exempting tax on tips, Social Security, overtime pay, first responders, and even 18 million veterans.

I kept hoping he’d come out and just break up with the income tax once and for all. And he did.

So what if we end the income tax, laying off all 93,654 IRS agents so you can keep every dollar you earn?

Will Washington have to run on bake sales?

Well, the income tax currently costs the American people $2.4 trillion a year.

Trump proposes to replace it with tariffs of 20% on everybody but China, who gets a special 60% tariff that might bring in $900 billion.

This would grow America’s economy like rocket fuel. I run through some numbers on the Substack but maybe a 20% increase in the economy near term, so about a $15,000 raise for the typical family.

Note that’s on top of the $18,000 of income tax you no longer have to pay.

Knock off $3,000 for tariffs and you get about $30,000 in additional income for the typical American family—nearly $3,000 per month.

It keeps getting better. Because going by low-tax countries today—or America before the income tax—we might double annual economic growth.

So 5% growth would be the new normal. And your kids would be three times richer than you—as it used to work in America.

America would be by far the richest country in the world. Also as it was before the income tax.

Of course, ditching the income tax would also mean the mother of federal budget holes. After all, replacing $2.4 trillion in income taxes with $900 billion in tariffs is a big hole.

Even if you add, say, an extra $500 billion in payroll and excise taxes from economic growth, you’ve still got a trillion dollars to cover.

Now we could let it run in deficit, letting the economy outgrow it. I mean, that’s what they do with everything else that doesn’t grow the economy.

But you could also cut a trillion dollars in federal spending.

How to do such a thing?

The other day, Elon Musk estimated he could cut $2 trillion in waste and fraudulent payments. Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, responded, suggesting the military-industrial complex and the pharma-industrial complex.

Indeed, going by countries like Britain, perhaps $800 billion of the $900 billion we spend on the military is for protecting Americans—the border, Coast Guard, nukes.

As for pharma and the medical-industrial complex, if we simply copy countries like Singapore we might save $2 trillion or more. And Americans wouldn’t go bankrupt getting knee surgery.

There’s the illegal aliens—$150 billion a year, minimum. And the trillion-plus we spend on welfare, much of it to the able-bodied.

Sharpen some pencils and you get a trillion dollars easy.

So you’re rich, the IRS is gone, and you get a nice, lean government.

So what’s next?

The uniparty will fight this like a rabid dog. But if a president can sell it to American voters, Congress will go along out of sheer self-preservation.

Plus, the bake sales would be lit.

Read the rest with charts and all the gory details at profstonge.com.

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