Trump’s Plan to Turn the IRS Into a Grifter’s Paradise

Don’t expect the good news to keep flowing. When Long was in Congress, he co-sponsored, in three consecutive sessions, a bill to abolish the IRS and replace the income tax, the payroll tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax with a 30 percent sales tax. This is a crackpot proposal that’s been kicking around since 1993, when the Church of Scientology dreamed it up to retaliate against the IRS’s refusal to recognize it as a religion. The Scientologists dropped the idea later that year when the IRS finally caved and said OK, sure, Scientology is a religion.

But the House GOP really liked the Scientologists’ plan, and introduced a version of it in nearly every subsequent congressional session. In 2023, Representative Kevin McCarthy won support from the GOP wingnut caucus by promising, among other things, that he’d allow the abolish-the-IRS bill to come to the floor. But he never did, because he knew associating Republicans with this policy would be politically ruinous. Even Grover Norquist, inventor of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that bound politicians never, ever to raise taxes—and who famously said he wanted to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”—urged Republicans to kill the bill. So did The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Lest you think this was an isolated misstep on Long’s part, he also co-sponsored, in three consecutive sessions, the Death Tax Repeal Act, another crackpot GOP proposal. This bill eliminated the estate tax and replaced it with, well, nothing. It actually came up for a vote once, in 2015, passing 240–179 in a majority-Republican House, before dying in a majority-Democratic Senate. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the repeal would have cost the Treasury $269 billion over 10 years.