Folks, gather ’round the fireplace because President Trump just tossed a live grenade into the punchbowl of American life. He announced—practically yesterday—that we might soon wave goodbye to income taxes altogether. Not just no tax on tips or overtime or Social Security benefits, which were already sweet enough to give a diabetic shock, but the whole rotten kaboodle. No more April 15ths spent weeping over Form 1040 while the IRS audits your underwear drawer. Instead, the money rolls in from tariffs on all the junk we’re importing from people who hate us anyway. It’s like making the rest of the world pay for our government while we sit back with a beer and watch American factories hum again. Beautiful, right? In theory, it’s the most America First idea since the cheeseburger.
BREAKING: President Trump just announced he expects the income tax to be ABOLISHED soon.
This would be the single greatest economic move in American history. Imagine taking home 100% of your paycheck?
The economy would explode overnight. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/aJYqvkUNQy
— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) December 2, 2025
Where the Heck Will the Money Come From?
Simple: foreigners. Every container ship full of plastic crap from Shanghai, every crate of overpriced French wine, every German car that costs more than a house in Ohio—slap a big, beautiful tariff on it, and the cash flows straight into Uncle Sam’s pockets. Trump calls it making China pay, Mexico pay, Europe pay, everybody pay except you and me. The importers technically write the check, but they pass the cost along to the foreigners in the form of lower profits or, better yet, deciding to build the damn factory in South Carolina instead of Shenzhen.
This year alone, tariff revenue already went from chump change to serious money. Monthly takes jumped from seven billion to thirty billion like a rocket with Elon Musk’s fingerprints on it. Annualized, we’re talking hundreds of billions more than the old days when we were politely bending over for globalists. And that’s before the really fun tariffs kick in—the 60% on China, the 20% on everybody else who’s been ripping us off for decades.
How Do They Collect It? Preferably With a Smile and a Howitzer
Customs and Border Protection handles the dirty work, same as always. A guy in a uniform looks at the manifest, calculates the tariff, and says, “That’ll be an extra 60%, pal.” No more 87,000 new IRS agents kicking down your door because you deducted the mileage on your church donation. Just some patriotic dudes at the ports collecting tribute from foreign freeloaders. If the ship captain argues, sink the bastard. (Kidding. Probably.) It’s government revenue the old-fashioned way—before Woodrow Wilson decided to tax ambition itself in 1913.
Back then, the entire federal government ran on tariffs and whiskey taxes, and somehow the country survived without a Department of Education telling kids they’re oppressed or a Bureau of Land Management owning half of Nevada. The budget was tiny, the country was free, and nobody had to file a 1040. Trump wants to take us back there, only with better highways and nuclear aircraft carriers.
Will It Actually Be Enough, or Are We All Moving to Galt’s Gulch?
Here’s where the rubber meets the road—or the container ship hits the dock. Right now individual income taxes rake in about 2.4 trillion a year. That’s half the federal haul, give or take. Total imports of goods run around 3.3 to 3.5 trillion. If you whack an average 60–70% tariff on everything (and Trump showing every sign he’s ready to do exactly that), you could theoretically pull in two trillion plus. In practice, imports would drop like a stone as prices skyrocket and companies rush home to avoid the pain. Good! That’s the point—bring the jobs back, watch wages rise, watch the tax base shift from your paycheck to Beijing’s balance sheet.
But let’s not kid ourselves: to make this work without turning the economy into a smoking crater, somebody has to take a chainsaw to the federal budget. We’re talking cuts measured in trillions, not billions. That’s where Musk and Ramaswamy come in with their DOGE chainsaw massacre. They promised two trillion in cuts. Musk already admitted two trillion might be a stretch—shocker, the government’s waste is even bigger than his ego—but even one trillion would be the biggest downsizing since the dinosaurs. Chop the duplicate agencies, the welfare for billion-dollar corporations, the foreign aid to countries that hate us, the studies on drunk fish or whatever nonsense they’re funding this week. Do that, and suddenly tariff money doesn’t have to carry the whole load. It just has to cover the sensible stuff: military, borders, courts, and maybe a few interstate highways.
The Bottom Line, Served Straight with a Twist of Lime
Can it work? Hell yes, if we finally admit the federal government has grown into a bloated, drunken beast that couldn’t balance a checkbook if its life depended on it. Tariffs alone won’t get us all the way there tomorrow, but they’re the stick that brings manufacturing home and forces Washington to go on a diet. Combine sky-high tariffs with DOGE swinging the axe, and in four or five years Trump might actually deliver on the wildest promise any politician ever made: a middle-class America where your entire paycheck is yours, the factories are humming in the Rust Belt, and the only people paying for our government are the foreigners who’ve been laughing at us for fifty years.
If that isn’t the most glorious middle finger to the swamp ever devised, I don’t know what is. Pass the popcorn—this show’s just getting started.