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Home Front: Politix

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick reveals Trump's ''goal'' to abolish the IRS, utilize tariffs so ''whole economy explodes''

2025-02-21

[NYPOST] One of President Trump's objectives over the next four years is to have US revenues from tariffs become so massive that the Internal Revenue Service is no longer needed, his commerce secretary revealed Wednesday.

That seems a stretch, but it would be good to reduce the need for the IRS, and its power.

''His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,'' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during an appearance on Fox News Channel's ''Jesse Watters Primetime.''

The former CEO of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald expanded a day later on his belief that Trump's sweeping tariff plan will be a boon for the US economy.

''As the president said, reciprocal tariffs, either you bring yours down or we're going to bring ours up. If we go to their level, it will earn us $700 billion a year to be equal to everybody else,'' Lutnick said Thursday, during an appearance on FNC's ''America's Newsroom.''

''And there goes our deficit. And interest rates come smashing down, and the whole economy explodes higher.''

Trump, 78, announced ahead of his inauguration last month that he plans to create an external revenue office tasked with collecting all foreign-sourced revenue, such as income from tariffs.

''For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS
...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies...
),'' the president wrote in a Jan. 14 Truth Social post. ''Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves.''

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly boasted that his tariff plan would bring the American economy back to a ''golden age,'' noting that before 1913 — when the 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to levy federal income tax — the government was primarily funded from tariffs.
The 16th amendment was necessary to override the Constitutional prohibition of a head tax.

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