A Catholic Case For Axing The Federal Income Tax

Above: US President Trump and Elon Musk, together with a special guest.

President Trump once said in reference to the arithmetic-defying 2020 election results that “if you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back.” This is the sort of classic Trump logic that resonates with the American people and just secured him another four years in the White House. So it’s not surprising that after the exposure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a publicly-funded money laundering operation, and last week’s revelations by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) about some 4.7 trillion dollars in untraceable Treasury payments, taxpayers are starting to apply the same Trump logic to their own losses: when do they get their diamonds back?

The distinction between taxation and legal plunder dates to at least St. Augustine, who posited in City of God that without justice, kingdoms are but “a great band of robbers.” Since the ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which authorized the imposition of a federal income tax, trillions of dollars have been purloined from the wallets of hard-working Americans, and squandered on propaganda, pet-projects, and pay-offs. Hitherto, national revenue mostly came from tariffs and, with the exception of a temporary Civil War era income tax, revenue tended to outstrip expenditure, and debt-to-GDP ratio generally hovered below ten percent. The theory underpinning the new-fangled progressive income tax was that instead of being a payment in exchange for benefits received, taxation should be based on an individual’s ability to contribute to the common welfare of the Nation. This seismic shift away from the 19^th century fiscal structure proved to be a blank check in the hands of the Federal government and has ever since been used to rob the taxpayer blind.

Indeed, describing the various schemes USAID has been funding as “a long list of crap” (as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put it), doesn’t come close to conveying the perfidious plundering of the public purse that the DOGE investigations have uncovered. A breathtaking $4.6 billion was paid over nine years under the guise of “refugee assistance” to Catholic Relief Services, an organization that openly (and illegally) teaches migrants in the country how to evade immigration law. $15 million was paid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for condoms and contraceptive distribution. $6.3 million was doled out to Engage Men’s Health for the support of homosexual men in South Africa, and almost $8 million dollars was paid to the International Research and Exchanges Board to teach Sri Lankan journalists about “binary-gendered language.” Then there’s the $20 million to produce a Sesame Street-inspired television show in Iraq promoting inclusion and respect. And the most duplicitous irony is the $8 million in putative subscriptions USAID paid to Politico, a publication that has been campaigning against Trump’s war on the administrative state since his first term. Now we know why.

As for the cool 4.7 trillion worth of payments from the Treasury Department that are missing a critical tracking code, we may never know in whose grimy hands they ended up.

The problem is that, philosophically at least, the taxpayer isn’t really entitled to know where the money ended up. According to the American Progressive Era (1890-1930) economists and social scientists who advocated the introduction of a federal income tax, to say that the individual supports the state only because it benefits him is a narrow and selfish doctrine. This brand of academics hoodwinked the public, who had historically regarded the income tax as an onerous and odious imposition, into accepting the German, socialistic philosophy that the individual is a debtor to the state, as opposed to the state being a benefactor and guardian of the individual.

A staunch advocate of this position, and one of the most influential drivers of the progressive income tax, was Edwin Seligman (1861-1939), a professor of political economy at Columbia University, and – like those who were simultaneously lobbying for the creation of a European-style central bank – a scion of one of the nation’s banking dynasties. Seligman argued that the individual pays taxes because it is as much his duty to support the State as to support himself or his family. The State, he wrote in his Essays on Taxation (first published in 1895), is “a part of us” and “as necessary to the individual as the air he breathes.” “The State can exist without the particular individual,” Seligman opined, “but the individual cannot exist without the State.”

Four years earlier however, Pope Leo XIII conveyed quite a different idea of the individual in his encyclical Rerum Novarum. He wrote that because the domestic household is a society older than any State, “it has rights and duties peculiar to itself which are quite independent of the State.” No, Man is not dependent on the State, he insisted, but antecedent to it, and “possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.” As such, when a man engages in remunerative labor, he acquires a right not only to just remuneration, but to possess that remuneration as property of his own, and to dispose of it in whatever way he pleases. This is in harmony with natural law, as it enables the father, as head of the household, to provide for his children, and to transmit to them an inheritance.

Now, Rerum Novarum was by no means a repudiation of moderate and fair taxation. Indeed, Leo XIII cited this as one of the elements, along with moral rule, well-regulated family life, respect for religion and justice, and so on, that facilitate public well-being and private prosperity. Our Lord Himself told us in Matthew 22:21 to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” and St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans similarly admonished Christians to render tribute “to whom tribute is due.” For the payment of tribute is a sign of subjection to earthly authorities, who are the ministers of God, that they might “govern the country in peace and quiet.”

As for what constitutes “moderate and fair,” St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on Paul’s epistle seems to espouse the traditional “benefits” theory of taxation by emphasizing its necessity both for the wages entitled to rulers, and to finance public services like the maintenance and repair of roads. Rulers can sin in accepting taxes in two ways, Aquinas reasoned: firstly, if they “do not procure the people’s welfare but are intent only on seizing their goods,” and secondly, if they “take more than the law permits and more than the people can bear.”

St. John Chrysostom similarly points out in his homilies on Matthew’s Gospel that rendering unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s only applies to those things “which are no detriment to godliness.” If they do prove a detriment, then “such a thing is no longer Caesar’s tribute, but the devil’s.” Hence Matthew’s previous role as a tax-collector is denounced in his own Gospel as a sinful existence of which he repented upon encountering Christ. For a publican’s collaboration with the Roman authorities in the exaction of tribute – a tribute Christ acknowledges as lawful, – was not in pursuit of godliness, but rather of worldly gain “by means of business, fraud, theft, crimes, and perjury.” (Moreover, it should be noted that Moses imposed a “temple tax” for the maintenance of the tabernacle (Ex. 30:11-16), and this tax was confirmed by good King Josiah (II Chron. 24:6) and Nehemiah (10:32) and St. Matthew confirms this justice by reporting how the Lord Himself paid it – even though He did not Himself owe it – in Matthew 17:27. But we all know what Our Lord also did in the Temple with the money changers – and all four Gospels record that incident, which occurred more than once.[1])

Had these United States observed the venerable Catholic tradition of morality, law, and justice, instead of being captivated by the state-centric theories of the German-trained “New Generation” economists, things might have turned out differently. Instead, the Hegelian notion of the individual as a constituent part of the larger state organism won the day and underpinned the dramatic expansion of the federal government that occurred over the next century.

By the 1930s and 40s, the financial seeds planted with the introduction of the income tax were already starting to bear fruit. The top marginal tax rate, which in 1913 started out at 7 percent, was hiked to 77 percent in 1936, and then an astonishing 94 percent toward the end of World War II. With a stream of easy money flowing into federal coffers and the incredible miracle of government bank borrowing, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt oversaw the proliferation of agencies, the swarming of bureaucrats, the explosion of the federal payroll, the soaring of government expenditure, the skyrocketing of national debt, and a long, unbroken string of deficits unprecedented in magnitude.

Then there was the art of the “grift” that flourished alongside this burgeoning administrative behemoth. While Americans were having their milk deliveries curtailed to save gas, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was swanning around the Pacific in a specially fitted-out Army transport plane. While commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Husband E. Kimmel was being denied the requested B-17 bombers and twin-engine seaplanes needed to patrol the approaches to Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was funneling aircraft, rifles, and Navy destroyers to Great Britain to fight an undeclared war against Germany which, according to a Gallup poll at the time, 84 percent of Americans wanted to stay out of. And on the same day that Mrs. Roosevelt opined on meat shortages in her daily column, she attended the third wedding of senior advisor and Lend-Lease administrator Harry Hopkins, where according to journalist John T. Flynn, guests dined on caviar, foie gras, mousse of chicken, turkey, Virginia ham, beef, calves head vinaigrette, and other culinary delights.

Now it’s starting to dawn on the average working family that they, their compatriots, and their forebears have been the unwitting victims of a century-long heist. In his treatise on the cardinal virtues, Aquinas clarified that “it is no robbery if princes exact from their subjects that which is due to them for the safeguarding of the common good.” But if these princes behave instead like “wolves ravening the prey to shed blood, and to destroy souls,” as the prophet Ezekiel warned, then they are even worse than robbers, and are bound to restitution, “as their actions are fraught with greater and more universal danger to public justice whose wardens they are.”

As valuable as a Tiffany diamond is, what has been stolen from the American people is priceless. They’ve been robbed of the security of being able to put any savings aside and accumulate wealth for the next generation. They’ve been robbed of the peace of having money leftover once rent, mortgage repayments, bills, and groceries have been taken care of. They’ve been robbed of the joy of being able to take that summer vacation. They’ve been robbed of the simple satisfaction of filling a full tank of gas or taking their family out for a meal. A multi-generational pilfering of wages and printing of easy money has triggered a financial pestilence that has cost Americans their homes, marriages, families, health, livelihoods, and even their lives. 

So unlike the Wall Street Journal, I’m not reading “MAGA Lite” in this country’s future. The commonwealth into which the individual freely enters has become – as Leo XIII warned it would under such circumstances – “an object of detestation rather than of desire.”  The people know they’ve been swindled and are not particularly interested in a “less assertive” Trump. Nor will they be appeased by a $5000 stimulus check.

I have previously advocated dismantling the administrative state by permanently starving the beast, which requires the elimination of its food source. Trump himself floated the idea of ending the federal income tax during his campaign, and more recently in a speech at the 2025 Republican Issues Conference in Miami. Without dramatic fiscal reform, and a philosophical shift away from the Hegelian view of “Man as serving the state”, to the Catholic understanding of “Man as preceding the State”, there will be no accountability, and no restitution of the vast losses incurred.

[1] St. John records the first time it happened in the first few weeks and months of the Our Lord’s ministry, immediately following His first miracle.