Trump's 'All Tariff' Proposal is Class War for the Rich

[Passages]

Donald Trump’s disastrous idea of replacing the federal income tax with a tariff would redistribute wealth upwards while likely necessitating devastating cuts to essential government programs.

Stephen Prager

Donald Trump is floating the idea of eliminating the federal income tax. In its place, he wants to implement an “all tariff policy,” according to a campaign source who recently spoke with CNBC. It’s an even more radical expansion of a policy Trump has already proposed publicly, to place a minimum 10-percent tariff on all imports to the United States, which would be used to finance more tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the rich.

Right now, our tax system is filled with loopholes that allow the rich to avoid paying what they owe. (Trump already made it more so with his 2017 tax cuts.) But at the very least, the U.S. is supposed to have a progressive income tax system, in theory. Trump’s plan would effectively fulfill the long-standing conservative goal of doing away with progressive taxation as we know it.

As Jonathan Chait writes in New York magazine:

[T]he rejection of progressive taxation on moral grounds remains a foundational tenet of American conservative thought. Conservatives have never stopped devising proposals to roll back progressive taxation, employing a wide array of creative ideas with varying levels of plausibility, from the utopian (the flat tax, the “fair tax,” Herman Cain’s 9/9/9 tax) to more banal proposals to slash or eliminate taxes on estates, capital gains, dividends, or the top income tax bracket.

These flat tax plans varied in their particulars, but the shared premise between all of them was that they would treat wealth identically at all income levels. This was sold as a means of making taxation “fairer,” but in practice, it would dramatically shift America’s tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the poor.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumps-all-tariff-proposal-might-be-his-most-evil-idea-yet