"What we should work toward, however, is abolishing...."

"What we should work toward, however, is abolishing the income tax and replacing it not with a national sales tax, but with nothing.  Right now the federal government is funded by excise taxes, corporate income tax, payroll taxes, the individual income tax, and miscellaneous other sources.  Abolishing the income tax on individuals would cut government revenue by about 40 percent.  I have heard the breathless claims about how radical that is - and compared to the trivial changes we are accustomed to seeing in the government, I suppose it is.  But in absolute terms, is it really so radical?  In order to imagine what it would be like to live in a country with a federal budget 40% lower than the federal budget of 2007, it would be necessary to go all the way back to.... 1997.

Would it really be so hard to imagine living in 1997 again?  In return, we would have an economy so robust and dynamic that it would doubtless shatter even my own optimistic expectations.  And we would once and for all have repudiated the totalitarian assumptions at the heart of the income tax." -Pages 79 & 80 of The Revolution, A Manifesto