Former President Donald Trump said he would seek to use tariffs to potentially eliminate the income tax in a lengthy interview with podcaster Joe Rogan released Friday night.
Trump, who enacted tariffs on steel and aluminum in 2018 during his presidency, sat with the podcaster in a nearly three-hour long episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan asked Trump if he was “serious” about using tariffs to offset the elimination of income taxes.
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“To me, the most beautiful word — and I’ve said this the past couple of weeks, in the dictionary today — is the word tariff,” Trump told Rogan. “It’s more beautiful than love, it’s more beautiful than any — it’s the most beautiful word. This country can become rich with the use, the proper use, of tariffs.”
Trump said he would impose a 200% tariff on John Deere’s tractors if it closed an American factory and moved production to Mexico in September.
“Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?” Rogan asked. “Were you serious about that?”
“Why not?” Trump responded. “Our country was the richest, relatively, in the 1880s and 1890s, a president who was assassinated named McKinley, he was the tariff king. He spoke beautifully of tariffs. His language was really beautiful: We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families unless they pay a big price and the big price is tariffs.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed in ads and in speeches that Trump’s plan to impose tariffs would act as a “national sales tax” and insisted that it would cost American families $4,000 a year in higher prices, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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