Trickle-Down Misinformation

And where it trickles from

One of my nephews—a good and smart kid (actually past 30 and becoming a father next month but they're all forever kids to me), but with some manosphere items in his media diet—told his mom that the Trump administration is going to free everybody who earns under $150,000 a year from paying any federal taxes, or at least federal income tax, and she texted me to find out what I knew about this, which at that point was pretty much nothing (my first thought was I'd heard something that might have sounded like this but actually meant something different). But it hasn't been reported by The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR, perhaps because they don't want anybody to know what a generous populist our president is.

In fact there really is something, though I wasn't able to trace such a plan to Trump himself. Trump has definitely talked about eliminating income tax for everybody, and the 16th Amendment, altogether, and going back to the McKinley era when the federal government was entirely financed by import tax revenues or tariffs. I believe that's a very long-term aspiration: right now, individual income taxes raise just short of a trillion dollars a year ($959 billion), 51% of government revenue, along with something like another trillion in corporate taxes, while tariffs bring in $35 billion, or 1.9% of the total. If Trump went as far with the tariffs as he's suggested he'd like to do, Peterson Institute calculates he could get that up to $225 billion, or a little less than a quarter of the way to replacing personal income tax (causing a massive recession along the way as the prices on imported consumer goods rose to make up for it, and an international financial crisis as US consumers stopped buying imported goods such as steel, aluminum, motor vehicles, appliances, food, lumber, and so on, and turned to housing themselves in Hoovervilles and eating at breadlines, so that they'd never raise that much revenue anyway; probably bankrupting the Social Security trust fund and Medicare too, as all the newly unemployed workers stopped paying the payroll tax!).

It turns out, however, that the more modest proposal for incomes under $150,000 comes from our clownish billionaire secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, as he told CBS in an interview on Wednesday:

I know what his goal is — no tax for anybody making under $150,000 a year. That's what I'm working for...

That's 93% of the population, though only about 25% of the individual income tax revenue, but sounds like he's eliminating the payroll tax (another $1.5 trillion a year) as well. And he remains committed to renewing the 2017 tax cuts especially benefiting the wealthiest, and a further reduction in corporate income tax (so we can lure businesses home from Ireland). But then maybe those DOGEboys will find a way to cut $2 trillion a year from the budget one of these days, and then there are those $5 million "gold cards" buying you instant permanent residence, if you could sell those to something like 40,000 billionaires per year you'd practically be home free. No, there aren't that many billionaires, or centimillionaires (something over 28,000 in the world, a pretty large number already Americans) either.

But then again, who needs Social Security? Not Howard Lutnick's 94-year-old mother-in-law, though she does appreciate it when the check shows up:

"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya. "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining."

It's only a bunch of malcontents who think they're entitled to it (they are, that's why it's called an "entitlement"), and they're probably fraudsters (they aren't).

And the reason The Times and WaPo and NPR haven't reported the story of the near-universal income tax exemption is that it's not ever going to happen, but isn't quite funny enough (unlike the plans to conquer Greenland, or the cheerful indifference to money of Mrs. Lutnick's mom). Or even Fox News or New York Post, as far as I can tell

But it does get picked up by Newsweek and Forbes and Reuters, and the Hindustan Times and the Farm CPA Report, and taken pretty seriously by the libertarians of Reason and Mint and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and from there down to a goodly number of bottom-feeding YouTubers like Mr. Snyder up at the top of the page, and that's how it gets out to the Internet, and somebody says, “Wow, if I ever make $150K this is gonna save me $24,000!”