Trump Wants You to Cheat on Your Taxes

He probably cheats himself and just wants a little company.

“There’s seemingly this mentality building,” Carolyn Schenck, a former national fraud counsel for the Internal Revenue Service, tells The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin. The mentality, Shenck says, is “the IRS isn’t going to catch me.” It isn’t that people are getting more corrupt. It’s that the president of the United States is inviting them not to pay.

I know that sounds harsh, but consider all the various ways Trump has told Mr. and Mrs. America that he doesn’t want their tax dollars.

In his second inaugural address, Trump spoke of replacing the progressive income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries,” Trump said, “we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Never mind that foreign countries don’t pay tariffs; United States consumers do. The point is that Trump thinks we can return to the days before 1913 when a much-smaller federal government didn’t bother with an income tax, funding the government instead mostly with tariffs.

Even before the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s blatantly illegal Liberation Day tariffs (the U.S. Court of International Trade is now contemplating whether also to strike down the temporary tariffs with which Trump replaced them), Trump’s arithmetic never added up. In the current fiscal year, the income tax accounts for 50 percent of all federal revenues. That excludes payroll taxes, which constitute another 35 percent of all federal revenues. By comparison, “customs duties” (i.e., tariffs) account for only about 7 percent of all federal revenues. Neither the Supreme Court ruling nor this unforgiving calculations from Trump’s own Treasury department discouraged Trump from saying in this year’s State of the Union address, “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day........

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