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Jan. 27, 2025 - The David Knight Show
15:09
Trump's Tax Talk: From Tariffs to IRS at the Border
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Let's talk a little bit about what's going on with the income tax as well as with the IRS and the border.
Trump conflated all those things together in Vegas.
In a Vegas speech, Trump floated eliminating the federal income tax.
He said, if the tariffs work out.
And this is not the first time he's talked about how, you know, we had...
A government that was funded, and he said from 1870 to 1913, we didn't have an income tax.
We didn't ever have an income tax.
Again, he doesn't know any history, whoever's writing his speeches.
I think he's just talking off the cuff here.
He doesn't know anything about it.
The first time we had an income tax was during the Civil War, and I'm not sure which one of the years it was, but 1861, 1865, first income tax.
That was our beloved Abraham Lincoln who did that to us.
And then it went away, and it didn't come back until 1913. So maybe that's what he's talking about.
Maybe the fact that the income tax maybe lingered around until 1870. But we had never had an income tax before that either.
And we had tariffs, and that was what supported the federal government in its entirety, were tariffs.
And so Trump said he may also put additional IRS agents at the border.
Probably move them to the border.
Yeah.
She said no tax on it.
How about just no tax?
He's just throwing us out.
You know, if the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen if you want to know the truth.
Years ago, 1870 to 1913, we didn't have an income tax.
What we had is tariffs, where foreign countries came in and they stole our jobs, they stole our companies, they stole our product, they ripped us off.
They used to do numbers, and then we went to tariff, a tariff system.
The tariff system made so much money.
It was when we were the richest from 1870 to 1913. Then we came in with the, brilliantly came in with an income tax.
No, we don't want others to pay.
Let's have our people pay.
And then you had the Depression in 1928, 1929. I call it 1929. That was a bad time.
But, you know, you didn't have tariffs and you had tariffs that ended in 1913. But it's...
It was the richest our country ever was.
That was President McKinley.
In fact, we're renaming the mountain, Mount McKinley.
Yeah, okay.
Let's go talk about renaming a mountain and a gulf, okay?
Well, you know, he wants to talk about 1870, 1913. 1870, 1913. That was like a, what, 43-year period there?
How about, you know, two score, okay, roughly?
How about the four score years from 1789 or so to 1861?
You know, for about twice as long.
We didn't have an income tax either.
But he says, yeah, I think we're going to move them to the border.
You know, they're allowed to carry guns.
How are they?
And we got about 80,000 of them, okay?
So let's use them at the border.
You know, we got a lot more IRS agents just newly hired, evidently, than we do military that they're willing to put at the border.
First it's 1,500 we'll put at the border, then it's 10,000.
And I'm talking, maybe we'll pull some troops from some of our foreign bases and put 20,000.
We got bases where they got 80,000 plus troops in other countries, but we can only spare, you know, 1,500, 10,000 or something.
And maybe we'll have to pull some from the other places to put them there.
But hey, I got an idea.
Let's put the...
IRS there.
Let's not get rid of the IRS agents.
And you know, when I looked at this, I thought, well, you know, maybe, and I'm sure that MAGA will put this theory out, so let me put it out there for them.
You know, maybe what he's trying to do with that and with the, you've got to go back to work, you know, you've got to have to actually show up to work or we're going to fire you.
And that's one way to get rid of them.
In a sense, you know, telling them that they've got to go to the border and carry guns.
If he actually does that, that may be kind of like the IBM no layoff policy.
I remember when I first got into engineering in those days, and I'm sure it's not that way anymore, but everybody was saying, you know, well, IBM never fires anybody and all this kind of stuff.
It's like, yeah, well.
If you want to work for them or whatever, I kind of looked at it as kind of like taking a job with a large bureaucratic organization that was going to be kind of stifling.
But what IBM did do, they did fire people.
What they would do is if they, and I talked to people who worked for IBM, and then quit.
Because if they didn't want to retain you, the way they would get rid of their employees without doing a mass layoff.
Is they would move a facility, let's say you're in New York, you're in Fishkill, New York or something, they move you somewhere into Arizona or something, right?
Completely different culture, climate, all the rest of this stuff.
And furthermore, if they want you to go, you know, they would pay for your move.
They might give you a pay increase or whatever, but the people that they just wanted to voluntarily quit, they wouldn't even pay for their move.
And so the people would just quit.
So maybe that's what's going on here.
Because we've had some federal people who are really upset about the fact that they've got to go back to work.
Listen to this woman.
As a government employee, what's so ironic about all this shit going on with Trump making us go in person five days a week to promote efficiency and also establishing the...
Department of Government Efficiency, the Doge.
What's really funny is because of all of this news and all of the change in policy, we are yapping more at work.
We are trying to digest everything that's going on.
We cannot get any work done because of how much information intake that, like, existing administration requires.
We're not yapping just to yap.
Because every single day, a memo comes down from God knows where, telling us that there's a new rule that we need to enforce for a job that does not relate to what we're doing.
Like, oh, you work for the FDA? Guess what?
Now you're going to have to enforce immigration.
Any fucking federal employee, guess what?
I didn't make it that far before.
So, sorry about that.
Yeah, so you work for the FDA. Now you're going to have to go enforce immigration.
You work for the IRS. We're going to send you to the border.
Now, that could be one way to get these people voluntarily quit because, you know, they've got their union rules and they've got a lot of other things.
Biden and the unions were doing all kinds of legislative tricks to try to make it difficult to get rid of anybody that works for the federal government.
When Trump came in, their move was to...
Reclassify a whole bunch of jobs as political that had not been classified as political before so they could get rid of them.
Look, it's all political.
Everything in Washington is political.
The entire existence of most of these agencies is nothing but political.
So of course the jobs are political and they can get rid of them.
But of course it's also changing the job aspect, making them actually come to work.
We're actually getting less...
Work done now because all we do is stand around and talk to each other.
And they make us do that.
We can't help it.
So Trump tells a crowd in Vegas that he's working with Congress on a bill to exclude tips from federal taxes.
So that brings us back to his first comment where he says, well, you know, it was much better when we...
When we had external taxes and we didn't have an income tax and so forth, and somebody yells out, just get rid of it.
You know, we'll have to see how it works out.
Maybe I'll do that.
So now everybody's, oh, he's going to get rid of the income tax.
Again, again.
Well, here's how this works, okay?
He's saying that he's going to make adjustments.
We're going to exclude tips from income tax.
Well, if you're going to exclude the income tax, then why are you bothering with that?
Why are you bothering with doing things like he's floated out an idea?
That he might not tax Social Security benefits or whatever.
Again, it means that he's going to keep whatever you think of the policies.
He keeps saying, well, I'm going to lower the corporate tax rate.
Well, it means he's going to keep the taxes.
I'm going to make my 2017 tax cuts permanent.
That means he's going to make the income tax permanent.
And if he makes all these different tax cuts there, that's showing that he's going to keep it.
You know, when you look at the big picture here, what is he saying he's putting the tariffs out there for?
Well, the stated purpose of the tariffs, and I'll say the stated purpose, the actual purpose is to raise taxes.
Because you're going to get both of these things.
It isn't a discussion as to which form of taxes you want, as I've been saying.
It's getting, you know, we've got a lot of different...
Things that have been floated over the years, a fair tax, a sales tax, a VAT tax, all these different things, and yet everybody, until Trump, would say, if you go to this other thing, we're going to wind up with both of them.
And we're going to wind up with both of them under Trump.
And the tariff is a tax on American consumers.
It's not a tax on foreign countries at all.
It's not even a tax on foreign businesses who are selling their products here.
It's a tax on the American consumer.
When he says, I'm going to put the terrace on here as an incentive for people to come to the United States.
Well, then with their corporations and to do production here.
Well, if you did that and you got rid of the income tax, where are you going to get your taxes?
Well, I said that we don't really need taxes and they're not really concerned about it.
The Democrats don't care.
They believe that deficits don't matter.
They've invented an entire...
Economic theory, the modern monetary theory, to say that deficits don't matter.
Trump doesn't think they matter either because he wants to suspend the debt ceiling for two years and so forth.
And he was the one who set us on a new trajectory, changed the slope of the increase, so then it went straight up.
And Biden continued that new slope.
But all of his talk about getting rid of the income tax is nothing other than just sheer demagoguery and lies.
He's using the tariffs to incentivize domestic production, right?
And then he's saying, well, you know, I could provide all the revenue that we need via tariffs.
Well, not if you've got people moving here.
You would lose all that tariff income.
So where does that come from?
It's going to come from the income tax that he's going to keep permanent.
He says he's going to lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, but it's still going to be there, and it's going to be there for each and every one of us as well.
Again, his first goal was to bring back production, but if production always comes back, then the tariffs go away to that extent.
They should be fine with that because they don't care about deficits.
They don't matter to them.
So, again, the question is, why tax us if the deficits don't matter?
Well, because what matters to them is that we don't have any disposable income.
What matters to them is that we don't become competition to them.
What matters to them is that we don't have any accumulation of capital, so we can't start businesses or keep them going.
James Sarolecki says, no, this couldn't happen.
Trump originally sold tariffs as a way to incentivize manufacturing in the U.S., which would reduce imports.
Now he wants us to keep importing as much as ever.
So that he can collect taxes from U.S. companies and consumers on those imports, and so that he can keep taxing us on our income as well.
So, again, it's just a head fake, and none of this stuff adds up.
But then we talk about the, well, let me get some of the comments here, because we're getting close on time.
DG8, thank you for the tip, says, Trump is so happy to call out 1913. Hmm, creation of the Federal Reserve.
Address that, Trump.
Yeah, he's not going to talk about that either.
He's talking about the income tax, and he's not going to get rid of it.
He doesn't even talk about the Federal Reserve, and of course he's not going to get rid of it either.
Jason Barker, Knights of the Storm, he says, a culling at a major producer is a massive windfall of taxpayer dollars for them.
Geesebusters and I covered this a year and a half ago.
That's absolutely right.
And again, it creates economic hardship.
For the businesses, small businesses can't keep it going.
Even if they get compensation for it, they don't have any other income.
So they're going to have to find something else and the business shuts down.
Angry Tiger.
None of these regulatory agencies are constitutional.
There's no way to fix them.
They should all be abolished.
Yes.
Matt Bradford.
With the intentional sabotage of the food supply, you have to be able to pivot on a dime.
Yard chickens is a great option.
I choose to eat other things and to put other things in my salad.
Before we run out of time, and we're almost out, when Trump says these 88,000 newly hired armed IRS agents, oh, that got the establishment very, very concerned about it.
Newsweek was furious.
They said he's reviving debunked claims that the agency has hired 88,000 enforcement agencies to go after taxpayers in the last few years.
It is a standing army.
Whether they're armed or not, it is a standing army.
And whether or not they put out 88,000 agents, I think that I would dispute Newsweek.
But whether or not that is true, they're still increasing.
The additional amount that they gave them was an amount that was equivalent to seven times their annual budget.
Address that as well.
Thank you for joining us.
Have a good day.
There's a post-election sale on silver and gold.
Trump euphoria has caused a dip in silver and gold.
It's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense is.
Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
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