It’s easy to get used to how things are in society and assume that, because we’ve never personally known anything different, that things were always this way (they weren’t). We also tend to assume that whatever we do now is the best possible choice we could make (often not true).
When President Trump first floated the idea of getting rid of the federal Department of Education, Americans were aghast. Why, that august institution-how will we live without it? But the DoE is a fairly recent creation. President Jimmy Carter created the agency in 1979; that’s not even 50 years ago. Millions of Americans born in the 50s and alive today completed most or all of their schooling in an era before anyone thought the federal government was necessary to direct the instruction of grade schoolers in all the states.
And given the performance of U.S. schoolchildren on measures of literacy and numeracy, no one can make a serious argument that today’s kids are better educated than people who graduated high school in 1978. Those poor scores can’t only be blamed on the pandemic, either. American pupil achievement has been declining for decades.
Now, Trump is shaking up our ideas about taxation, too. What do you think about an end to the federal income tax? Sound radical? Unthinkable? If you stretch your mind back further, you’ll find that the U.S. never had a federal income tax until 1913. Yes, the world is different and in many ways more complicated today, but that reality doesn’t translate into a “need” for a voracious federal government that takes a chunk out of every dollar Americans earn. There are, in fact, other ways to fund a government.
Trump has floated the idea of ending the federal income tax before, but in February 2025, he’s not pushing it—yet. He does appear to be aiming in that direction by chipping away at the bottomless money hole that the IRS has become.
LibsOfTikTok highlighted the news with a clip of straight-talking White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt confirming that, yep, the president wants to slash taxes to the bone. His priorities include ending taxation on tips, ending taxes on overtime pay, re-starting the middle-class tax cuts Trump first enacted during his 2016-2020 term, and more.
Listen below:
Judging by the comments from X users, a whole lot of Americans like what they’re hearing.
But for some, it’s not enough.
And, there are details that need to be worked out to avoid unintended pitfalls for retirees.
