Make America 1893 Again
Trump's tariff plan isn't just bad math; it's a nostalgic yearning for the days when the rich paid nothing and the poor died in alleys.
The cavernous, echoing space between Donald Trump’s ears is a strange place, a funhouse mirror distillery where half-remembered Wharton buzzwords and Hannity talking points ferment into policies that would make Calvin Coolidge blush.
His latest brain-fart, floated with the casual confidence of a drunk uncle explaining crypto at Thanksgiving, is a real humdinger. It’s a policy prescription that manages to be simultaneously economically illiterate and sociopathically cruel, which is the sweet spot for the MAGA intelligentsia.
The idea: Let’s scrap the federal income tax—the whole thing. And let’s replace the revenue by just taxing the f#@k out of foreigners with massive, sprawling tariffs.
“We have so much money, we’re going to take in,” Trump declared recently, eyes glimmering with the promise of free lunch. “It could be a replacement for the income tax.”
It’s a beautiful, simple concept, provided you have the economic literacy of a gilded crested newt (see above).
It’s the geopolitical equivalent of thinking you can pay your mortgage by searching the couch cushions for loose change.
The MAGA faithful hear this and immediately picture a sepia-toned paradise of yeoman farmers and bustling, soot-choked factories, a return to an era before the IRS jackboot was on the neck of the common man. They view the 16th Amendment (which standardized the income tax in 1913) as the moment of original sin.
The history
For the first 120 years of this country’s existence, the Treasury mainly ran on customs duties and taxing whiskey. If you were alive in 1885, Uncle Sam didn’t touch your paycheck.
But let’s be crystal clear about what that America actually looked like.
That “golden age” of tariff-funding was the Gilded Age, a sprawling, unregulated feedlot for burgeoning monopolies, where “federal government” basically meant the Army, the postal service, and a few guys in green visors counting barrels at the docks.
There was no Air Force. There were no interstate highways. No FDA was making sure your sausages didn’t contain ground-up fingers. Most importantly, there was zero social safety net. If you got old, sick, or injured in a factory accident, your retirement plan was starving to death in an alley or hoping your children made enough in the coal mines to support you.
That is the fiscal structure Trump is waxing nostalgic for. He wants to finance a 21st-century superpower with a 19th-century mercantile cash register.
The sheer mathematical stupidity of the proposal is breathtaking. The federal government currently spends roughly 23% of GDP. In the tariff heyday of the 1800s, it spent about 2%.
Today, the individual income tax brings in about $2.6 trillion a year. Tariffs bring in about $100 billion. To bridge that gap, you don’t just need to raise tariffs; you need to jack up duties by something like 2,600%.
But tariffs have a funny self-destruct mechanism. They are the economic equivalent of a chokehold. You squeeze a little, you get revenue. You squeeze too hard, you kill the victim. If you raise the tax on imported widgets to 200% in a desperate attempt to fund Medicare, people just stop buying imported widgets. Trade ceases. The revenue stream dries up faster than Trump’s interest in a briefing book that doesn’t contain his own name.
Instant national insolvency
If you actually tried to run the modern American state on tariffs alone, you would face instant national insolvency. To balance the books, you’d have to vaporize the entire legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Goodbye Social Security. Goodbye Medicare. Goodbye, 80% of the Pentagon.
But the math isn’t even the worst part. The malice is the worst part.
This proposal is the ultimate tell in the great populist grift. Trump sells this as “sticking it to China,” relying on the rubes not knowing that the importer pays the tariff at the dock and immediately passes the cost to the consumer at Walmart.
A tariff-for-income-tax swap is the single greatest upward wealth transfer scheme since the invention of feudalism. You are trading a progressive tax—which, for all its loopholes, at least feigns a structure where hedge fund managers pay a higher percentage than baristas—for a hyper-regressive consumption tax.
Private equity ghouls vs. single Moms
When you shift the tax burden onto the price of physical goods, the single mother spending 95% of her paycheck to keep her kids fed and clothed gets hammered on every transaction. Meanwhile, the private equity ghoul sitting on a mountain of unrealized capital gains gets a pass. It’s taxing existence rather than accumulation.
Trump, in his reptilian cunning, understands that his base hates the IRS more than they love the idea of a functional government. He’s dangling the shiny object of “no income tax” without mentioning the price tag, which is an instant return to Dickensian squalor.
We’d be returning to the real 1893: a land of untaxed robber barons building marble palazzos while Pinkertons beat striking workers in the street, and the federal government is too small and broke to do a damn thing about it. That’s the “great” again. It’s a nostalgic wet dream for people who think Cornelius Vanderbilt didn’t go far enough.