Could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? 

Another Tax Day has come and gone. Here I sit, all broken-hearted. The tax-industrial complex has once again swallowed up thousands of dollars that used to be mine. But this year, I found myself legitimately wondering: could this be the last time I ever have to pay my taxes? 

One of the major pillars of President Trump’s economic platform is the abolition of income tax for all Americans who make less than $150,000 a year. This sounds like a fantasy, an empty chicken-in-every-pot promise, like a student council candidate winking after saying, “If you elect me, I’ll make sure we have soda in the drinking fountains.” But if Trump 2.0 has shown anything this year, it’s a willingness to set into motion seemingly impossible plans. 

Yesterday, Tax Day, I spent two hours on a Zoom call sponsored by the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute of Brookings Institution. I willingly chose this fate because I’d read an article by Howard Gleckman of that Tax Policy Center titled, “We May Be Watching the Death of the Federal Income Tax.” Please let it be so, I thought. The topic was, “How Will Large Reductions in the Internal Revenue Service’s Funding and Staffing Affect Taxpayers?” The short answer: not great, Bob. Unless you’re an actual taxpayer. 

The dozen or so people who spoke on the Zoom call seemed concerned about IRS staffing cuts, but only because it was affecting their “hard-working” colleagues who, according to them, were just there to help good citizens adjudicate legitimate tax disputes. Their major concerns appeared to be that DoGE would be replacing their colleagues with incompetent AI systems, and also that the new Trump-run IRS would be sharing sensitive tax information with ICE. This would all endanger “modernization” efforts to pursue high-income tax cheats. 

While they briefly broached the idea that the government might do away with the income tax entirely, they took that about as seriously as the idea that Canada would become the fifty-first State. It was a political fantasy, not a bureaucratic reality. But they’re trapped in a pre-Trump mindset. 

Look at the reality. IRS staffing cuts, tariff mania and a burgeoning and unavoidable ideological movement away from income tax appear to be slowly awakening even the bought-and-sold minds who do liberal tax policy for a living. Texas and Florida are booming for several reasons, but the major one is that they have no state income tax. Mississippi, no longer the butt of every joke, just got rid of its own state income tax. Oklahoma is following suit. The number of tax-free states has grown to the double digits. People don’t want the government taking money directly out of their paychecks. It’s that simple. 

Trump’s presumptive pick to head up the IRS, former Louisiana congressman Billy Long, is a hard-right-winger who has advocated for getting rid of the IRS’s “Direct File” system, has supported the Tax Code Termination Act and has often spoken out on moving to a national sales tax and abolishing the IRS entirely. He’s on an anti-tax mission from God. 

Getting rid of the income tax wouldn’t happen without a struggle; it’s enshrined in the 16th Amendment of the Constitution. But the Trump administration, as we’ve seen, considers the Constitution as a navigable roadblock to its populist aims, not the tablets of Sinai. Honestly, good riddance. Everyone I know, from the most paleoconservative troll to the most fervent resistance liberal, considers the federal income tax to be an Atlas-level burden. The efforts of DoGE have uncovered that our tax dollars have been funding some unbelievably absurd DEI crap, as well as the usual evil. I don’t want my money funding transgender operas in Peru or the war machine. You probably don’t either. So you’d be a hypocrite if you opposed the most serious effort in our lifetime to wipe away the income tax for working- and middle-class Americans. 

If this fantasy that might become reality – no income tax! – had been in place my entire life, it would mean that I would have never given the government a penny, not even in the rare years when everything lined up in my favor, money-wise. Thoughts of civic duty don’t flash through my mind when I ponder this alternate timeline dream-reality. Instead, I think “hell yes.” Free me from my tax burden, O Orange One.