Pitching a monumental and potentially controversial proposal to his Republican allies, President Donald Trump is seemingly floating the idea of scrapping federal income taxes altogether.
“We had no income tax. The income tax came in…1913. As I said in my speech last week, instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens,” Trump said during his conference address in Doral, Florida, on Monday.
“It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” he added. “You know, the United States in 1870 to 1913, all tariffs. And that was the richest period in the history of the United States, relatively speaking.”
The first federal income tax was passed on Feb. 25, 1913, as part of the 16th Amendment. This gave Congress constitutional authority to levy taxes on corporate and individual income, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
