And now, it’s time to consider abolishing the federal income tax, and the noxious IRS along with it.
That, at least, is what lawmakers are increasing coming to conclude, spurred on by much-publicized recent statements by President Trump himself, statements extolling tariffs as the Founding Father-approved method of funding the fedgov, even while pushing to get rid of income taxes.
H.R. 25
Now, the House has introduced a bill, H.R. 25, whose titular purpose is “To promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity by repealing the income tax and other taxes, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and enacting a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States.” Sponsored by Georgia congressman Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, the bill, from what we can ascertain (the text has not yet been released) is a proverbial instance of a broken clock occasionally getting the time right.
Congressman Carter is not a particularly distinguished constitutionalist, with a cumulative Freedom Index score of 59 percent and a score for the most recent Congress, the 118th, an anemic 48 percent. Yet in this instance, Carter has done the country an incalculable service by starting the legislative ball rolling on one of the most consequential issues to gain currency inside the Beltway in recent memory.
Big Government Is the Problem
To be clear, the IRS and the heavy graduated income tax we all endure are not the etiology of the disease infecting our body politic, but only the symptoms. The real sickness — the one underlying not only our onerous system of federal taxation, but also our ballooning national debt and annual deficits — is a serial lack of fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. Most of our fiscal, financial, and even economic woes can be traced to the overweening size, cost, and oppressive nature of Big Government. It is Big Government that creates its own snowballing rationale for taxation and deficit spending, and which fights tooth and nail to perpetuate and aggrandize itself at the expense of the rest of us (witness the wailing and gnashing of teeth in Washington over Trump’s efforts to lay off slothful, overpaid federal workers and to freeze lavish expenditures such as foreign aid). As long as the mentality enabling Big Government defines the Overton Window of political discourse, no amount of tax cuts will truly cure the problem.
But going after the IRS and the Marxist graduated income tax system is certainly a good start. Doing so in tandem with the activities of DOGE is a very promising trend indeed.
