OPINION:
Washington today is designed to be president-proof. And Congress-proof. Ultimately, citizen-proof.
Anybody can campaign on any wild promises they like. They can get elected on those promises. They can even take over a chamber of Congress by making such promises. And of course, a president can take over the entire executive branch on the wildest promises he can think up.
But rest assured, the prevailing bipartisan agreement in Washington, going back more than 50 years, is that nothing will ever actually get done in Washington that threatens its central power. The first rule of Washington Fight Club is that everything is in service of Washington Fight Club.
All the fights are fake. Nothing ever gets fixed. Everything always stays the same.
That is why they despise Donald Trump so much.
The single most shocking and threatening thing to happen to Washington Fight Club occurred on Jan. 20, 2017, when Mr. Trump stood on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol and openly violated the first rule of Washington Fight Club. He announced that he was not kidding. His campaign had not just been another cruel joke on the American citizen.
Indeed, Mr. Trump declared that he intended to keep all the promises he had made to voters. (This is why, by the way, Mr. Trump would receive 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016.)
One of his worst crimes as president was that Mr. Trump became the first president this century not to launch a war against a foreign adversary.
On the domestic front, he placed three brave constitutionalists on the Supreme Court, paving the way for kicking the issue of abortion back to citizens and lawmakers of the states where it belonged. By doing so, he bankrupted and scattered the powerful lobbyists lined up on both sides of the abortion issue in Washington.
One of the least discussed diseases of Washington Fight Club is the powerful incentive of both lobbyists and the lawmakers they own to never actually solve the problems they profess publicly to care so much about. For them, solving a problem is akin to killing your most lucrative Golden Goose.
As much as Donald Trump loves everything gold, he doesn’t care much about any of the precious Golden Geese in Washington Fight Club.
Now, Mr. Trump has turned his reckless eye to tax policy. Seemingly on a whim, Mr. Trump announced last week that he intends to eliminate taxes on tips. (Interestingly, President Biden’s broad amnesty for illegal aliens living illegally in the U.S. is the exact same legal framework Mr. Trump could use to simply provide mass blanket amnesty against prosecuting anyone who does not pay federal income taxes on their tips. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!)
Upon further reflection, Mr. Trump proposed scrapping the entire federal income tax for all citizens in favor of running the entire government by raising tariffs on imported goods.
Just like Mr. Trump’s position on wars and abortion, this runs hard against both liberal Democratic orthodoxy and supposedly “conservative” Republican orthodoxy. It is bipartisan orthodoxy because the federal income tax is the very lifeblood of Washington Fight Club.
Now, I do not even know if it is mathematically possible to run the world’s most powerful military on tariffs alone. But I sure as hell trust Mr. Trump more than I do all the genius economists and Republican “free traders” who immediately denounced the proposal as some kind of dangerous scheme that will wreck our economy.
Seriously? Does anyone still listen to these kleptocrats who brought you the economic collapse of 2008, bank bailouts, “Obamacare,” the Social Security Ponzi scheme and $30 trillion in government debt?
At the very least, Mr. Trump’s idea of eliminating the federal income tax is not the worst idea a president has had in the past 25 years. Hell, it’s not the worst idea a president has had in the last 10 minutes.
In fact, it just might be a brilliant idea.
The single greatest evil in America today is the federal government’s war on work. Anyone who works is punished for working.
And it is not just the federal income tax that punishes people who work. There are forced taxes for a Social Security fund that lawmakers steal faster than workers can fill it. Onerous regulations for any company that dares to hire a worker. The threat of jail time if you fail to report everything properly to the federal government.
And then there are the mountains of welfare programs paid to able-bodied adults not to work. Every time a small business tries hiring a worker, that company competes not with other small businesses but with a federal government eager to pay an able-bodied adult to sit home and play video games instead of working.
Tariffs, meanwhile, are the closest thing we have to a consumption tax — which is the very opposite of punishing people for working. And since those taxes would be collected at the border, it just might force Washington Fight Club to start enforcing our borders and pay attention to everything — and everyone — coming into our country.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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