Victor Davis Hanson

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2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

But that's never happened since. If he balances the budget in one of the next two budget years and the war in Ukraine is over with and he stops it, he will be reelected. I mean, excuse me, he will have his house reelected and he will maintain that majority and he will be an iconic president if he does those two things. And the left knows that. So the left is going to do all it can.

In fact, I have colleagues at the institution in which I work, which will remain nameless, who are doing all they can to suggest that the war not be ended. In other words, that it's going to be a giveaway to Putin and you can't do it. And we know people in the Congress that are trying to stop this budget. They tried and they do not want any cuts. They do not want any more oil production. They don't

will oppose the gold card and they do not want any tariffs. But if he's able to overcome that, as I said, it'll be something that's historic.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't help when they have a congresswoman... Marcy Kapoor, whatever her name is, in Ohio. And she's saying that Elon Musk has only been a citizen for 23 years. Therefore, he doesn't have allegiance to the United States. And who is he loyal to, Canada or the United States? And this comes from the left when they can't

They can't go through a congressional session where they don't have a resolution faulting Republicans for harassing poor immigrants and being xenophobic and nativist. And now they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. They've called him a Nazi. They've called Elon Musk Hitler. They've called him a crook. And now they're calling him a disloyal, naturalized citizen. Naturalized citizen.

And this is something that I thought only the far, far right did. Blood and soil. There are blood and soil Democrats now. You're not really a U.S. citizen unless you were. Is that right, Congresswoman, unless you were born in the United States? You're a nativist now. You don't trust him. It's just mind boggling. Everything they've said has no logic. He wasn't confirmed.

Well, either it was a national security file. You're saying that Jake Sullivan was illegitimate because he was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate? Well, he's making money. Well, he's the richest. He came in worth $450 billion. Where is he making money? They ask him to bail out our astronauts that NASA can't save. And so I don't know where he's making money. He's losing money, actually.

By doing what he's doing, you have Tesla dealerships that are being vandalized. You have people who have Teslas that are having their cars vandalized. You've had left-wing huge boycott of Teslas. You've got the German government after him where there's a gigantic Tesla factory in Germany. He's taken a huge hit. The stock has fallen by 10% or 15%.

He's lost money by doing what he's doing, just like he lost money with X. I don't know where he's going to keep making money because he probably lost $30 or $40 billion by opening up all of social media, by taking Twitter, which was a toxic player in the social media world, and opening it up with influence on other people to do the same.

And he's losing money on... I think he's losing probably tens of billions of dollars in the stock price on Tesla. And I guess SpaceX is a private company, but... I don't get the impression that he is buying estates. He lives in very simple. He dresses very simple. He lives very simply. He doesn't splurge. He does things that the left should be on their knees praising him.

He's provided Starlink service for the people who were burned out in Los Angeles free. He's provided it for the Ukrainians so that they have a chance to defend themselves from Russia. He has not provided it for Russia. He has not charged them. He was a big icon among the left until about a year ago.

Well, they had a brief income tax for the Civil War just as a one-time stopgap. But the problem was that in the Constitution, I think it's Section 1, Article 2, it says that the federal government cannot have an excise, a blanket tax without apportionment, without apportionment.

And that has been, that had been, I don't think the founders knew what they were doing on that particular, I don't know if they intended it, but what it was ruled in a famous, I It was ruled that it was literal. In other words, if you're the federal government and you want to tax the population, you can't just issue a tax on everybody as individuals. You have to apportion it by the states.

So that would mean, according to the court interpretation, which stood until 1913, it would say the following. we need $100 million. I'm just taking an arbitrary figure. Okay. The 50 states, each one will contribute to that based on the percentage of the population. So, California, whatever the state was, would be adjudicated, prorated. And then the state then would contribute as a state

So say California is one-sixth of the population, they would pay one-sixth of the tax bite. And so that's how it was. And everybody understood that that was a... block. There were people who tried to get an income tax. They really wanted it throughout history.

But because it's in the Constitution that all states have to be apportioned, all income taxes have to be apportioned, that was pretty much the rule. And they didn't know how to get around it. And Supreme Court cases had, by a very close margin, five to four, had upheld that. So the only way you can overrule the Constitution and or a Supreme Court decision is get a constitutional amendment.

So to get a constitutional amendment, you need three quarters of all of the states and you need two thirds of the House and the Senate. It's almost impossible to do unless there's something with broad support, 18-year-old vote, women's suffrage. And there was. And why was there? Because... This was the height of the progressive movement under Woodrow Wilson was elected in 2012.

He always wanted the income tax. And the reason they got it through was, as you pointed out, the chief source of revenue was tariffs. And the tariffs were not like... 3% or 5%. They were sometimes 30% and 40% of goods, and they protected domestic industry. But the left, the progressive, and to the extent that they were populist movement said, these tariffs, and correctly so, are taxes.

So, they're increasing the price for goods on American citizens, number one. And number two, to echo an old

nullification argument by South Carolina before the Civil War, people said they are protecting the Yankees, where I think there was about four or five states that were responsible for almost all the tariff revenue, New York, Massachusetts, where all of the industry was at that time, and around the Great Lakes area. So the argument was... Wilson, the progressive movement elected Wilson.

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