If we were to do away with the 16th Amendment, thereby eliminating Federal income taxes, could the gov't make up the lost revenue via tariffs on imports (or some other method which creates American jobs)?
Seems like a win to me, but I don't know where to start to find the right stats.
Not that high. I have been for tariffs for a long time... but they would need to be supplemented somehow. A change to property taxes, corporate taxes and sales taxes could do the trick. But either way, it doesn't matter how much you tax, really. The problem is in spending.
I want to see the numbers.
How much do we import each year?
How much is collected in income tax revenue?
The math should be simple from there.
Not that simple. You have to assume imports are not perfectly inelastic. A tariff would decrease the amount of imports somewhat. I just quickly looked up the numbers and a 25% average tariff rate gets you about 33% of income tax revenues assuming perfectly inelastic imports.
Yeah, I'm sure the market will react. Elasticity is a key feature.
I'm convinced we should only tax that which we want to reduce.
Taxing income and sales don't qualify, as more of both is better.
Do you have any suggestions?
The obvious choice, vice taxes, seems to just grow the black market.
The problem is income taxes are very good for their redistributive properties. You do want some redistribution in society. Thats why I think property taxes can help as you can make them extremely progressive. Corporate taxes can be good too but you'd need a whole new set of laws to prevent tax evasion and fraud (and probably lobbying) which we don't have in place right now (which is why Amazon and Hollywood etc basically shit all over America)