Taking in billions! Cool dude! Tariffs seem to do everything you wanted them to do, right? Well I am happy for you.
Those things that you tariff you are paying to your government as taxes. Notice you are not selling your products around the world like you used to? Notice your resort hotels, restaurants, tourist businesses are way down and suffering.
So let me get this straight … you pay more, you sell less, and you are bragging? Well congratulations! See? I am so happy for you.
Cherry on top? Your farms have no workers, so you don’t have to cry other countries don’t buy your crops because seems to be you have no crops. Hey, you really got great news on top of great news. Keep bragging my former friend, keep bragging!
The USA is NOT raking in billions more that expected.
Tariffs won’t bring in any money at all into the USA. Not one cent. All that they do is raise money for the federal government from American consumers. The money isn’t brought into the country, just transferred from ordinary citizens to the federal government.
Tariffs are in effect a federal sales tax, so if there is a tariff of 30% on an item, the American importer must pay an import tax (tariff) of 30% to the federal government, and all things being equal, the consumer will end up paying an extra 30% for the item when they buy it in the shops.
Trump is lying, as usual.
For Trump tariffs are a cunning way to raise taxes (not liked by MAGA supporters), while pretending he is attacking foreign countries (liked a lot by MAGA supporters), hoping that his MAGA supporters won’t notice that he is making them pay higher taxes (Trump assuming, probably correctly, that they are stupid).
Having raised the tariff revenue from ordinary citizens (which is a tax), Trump plans to use that money to cut other taxes for his billionaire friends.
Sorry to disappoint you, but you have been lied to, and have been very gullible, as well.
Mainstream professional economist here.
The US dollar — the broadest signal of the health of the USA in the global environment — is collapsing rapidly. The US economy contracting badly. The $97.8 billion collected in tariffs as of 2 July 25 has been paid almost exclusively by American consumers and American importers — depressing their standard of living.
Were the tariffs to continue as they have, that would impose a consumption tax of about 200B on a GDP of about 32T. About 0.6%, or something considerably lower than a sales tax.
So if consumption is depressed by ordinary price elasticities, we would expect a decline in consumption of about half a percent due to the tariffs — and half a percent of 32T is 160B in lost GDP.
So the economy will shrink by about what the coffers increased — more because of the inefficiencies —meaning that American consumers and employees will have given up pretty much what the feds have taken, and then some.
