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(NEW YORK) — In recent campaign speeches, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly floated an eye-catching idea: the elimination of individual income taxes.

The proposal follows a string of other tax cuts put forward by Trump, including the removal of taxes on car-loan payments, social security benefits and servers’ tips. But a potential elimination of personal income taxes for all Americans goes much further.

When podcast host Joe Rogan asked Trump last week whether he was serious about the new plan, Trump said, “Yeah, sure, why not?”

The U.S. would pay for the lost tax revenue with far-reaching tariffs, Trump said.

“We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families, unless they pay a big price — and the big price is tariffs,” Trump added.

The individual income tax currently accounts for roughly half of the $5 trillion in revenue that the federal government brings in each year.

It is unclear whether Trump’s proposal would also include the elimination of payroll taxes and corporate income taxes. Those duties account for another 40% of U.S. tax revenue, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Even in its smallest form, it would be a pretty substantial change from current policy,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told ABC News.

But he acknowledged that the details about how that proposal would actually work have been scarce. “We don’t have a full proposal,” Goldwein said.

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the Trump campaign referenced the tax cuts enacted during his first term. But the campaign did not comment directly on his newer proposal of eliminating the individual income tax.

“President Trump passed the largest tax CUTS for working families in history and will make them permanent when he is back in the White House in addition to ending taxes on tips for service workers and ending taxes on Social Security for our seniors,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, told ABC News.

It would be all but impossible to make up for the lost revenue with increased tariffs, experts told ABC News.

On the campaign trail, Trump has promised a sharp escalation of tariffs during his first term. He has proposed tariffs of between 60% and 100% on Chinese goods.

Envisioning a far-reaching policy, Trump has proposed a tax of between 10% and 20% on all imported products. Earlier this month, he told the audience at the Economic Club of Chicago that such a tariff could reach as high as 50%.

Last year, the U.S. imported about $3.8 trillion worth of goods, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis found. To generate the same amount of revenue currently brought in by the individual income tax, a tariff would have needed to be set at about 70%, Alan Auerbach, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on tax policy, told ABC News.

However, a tariff of such magnitude would significantly reduce U.S. trade, slashing the total amount of imported goods and, in turn, reducing tax revenue.

“It wouldn’t be feasible,” Auerbach said.

Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the Tax Foundation, echoed that view. “It’s mathematically impossible,” York said.

Replacing the individual income tax with tariffs would also shift a greater share of the tax burden onto low- and middle-income households, experts said.

The top 50% of earners accounted for nearly 98% of all federal income taxes in 2021, according to the Tax Foundation. The bottom 50%, in turn, made up about 2% of income tax payments.

Higher tariffs are widely expected to raise prices of consumer goods, since foreign producers typically pass the cost of higher taxes onto customers. As a result, the costs of higher tariffs would fall evenly across U.S. households, since all Americans purchase consumer goods.

In some cases, low- and middle-income earners would pay a higher proportion of the cost burden, since consumer spending often makes up a higher share of their overall budget than it does for their well-off counterparts, Goldwein said.

“Tariffs are at best a flat tax and more likely a regressive one,” Goldwein added.

Trump would have some latitude in setting and implementing tariffs, experts previously told ABC News.

But his proposal to eliminate the personal income tax would require support from both houses of Congress.

“Trump can’t just eliminate the individual income tax,” York said. But, she added, Trump may seek to negotiate tax cuts in 2025, when many of the provisions associated with his signature tax reform law are set to expire.

“Trump could possibly negotiate further tax cuts to be added to those,” York said. “But I don’t see a situation where Congress would align with this swap between the income tax and tariffs.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The 2024 voting season officially kicked off Friday, as voters in three states can now line up at early voting polling sites or election offices to cast their ballot.

Early in-person voting sites opened throughout Virginia, on Friday, marking the first state to offer their voters that option. The state’s early voting sites will remain open until Nov. 2.

Over 1,796,000 votes were cast early in person in Virginia in the last presidential election, roughly 40% of the total vote, according to data from the Virginia Department of Elections. An additional 962,877 Virginia voters cast their 2020 ballot through the mail, with roughly 574,000 submitting their mail-in ballot before Election Day, according to the election data.

While the voters will be lining up at the polls in Virginia, voters in two other states will have the opportunity, starting Friday, to cast their ballot in person through a different method.

Minnesota and South Dakota are among 23 states that allow voters to hand in their absentee ballots in person to an election office or other designated location instead of mailing them.

In the last presidential election, over 1.9 million Minnesota voters voted via absentee, with 1.7 million of those ballots being returned before election day, according to the state’s Office of the Secretary of State.

Roughly 57% of the total Minnesota 2020 election ballots were cast before Election Day, according to the state data.

The office does not have data on the number of 2020 voters who opted to hand in their absentee ballot to an office.

Roughly 83,000 South Dakota voters cast their ballot through in-person absentee drop-off before Election Day in 2020, according to South Dakota’s secretary of state office.

Voters in a handful of other states who requested an absentee ballot can soon start checking their mailboxes, as this weekend also marks the deadline for some election offices to begin sending out their absentee ballots.

Idaho, Maryland, New York and West Virginia are all required to send out their absentee ballots Friday to all voters who requested one, according to the respective states’ election offices.

North Carolina must send out absentee ballots to military and overseas voters on Friday, according to the state’s election office.

Delaware, Indiana, New Jersey and Tennessee are required to send absentee ballots to their voters by Saturday, according to the states’ respective election offices. Some counties in Oklahoma may start sending their paper ballots to voters on that day, too, according to the state’s election office.

Experts predict there will be a large number of early voters this election season as the voting method has risen in popularity.

During the 2020 election, more than 69% of votes cast in the election were done through either mail-in ballots or early in-person voting, according to election data compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s election data science lab.

By comparison, only 40% voted early in the 2016 election and 33% in the 2012 election, the data showed.

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