Quote:
Originally Posted by RX792P
$300 Billion?
Tariff revenues have been growing for months, and the latest data shows that the U.S. has collected $133.7 billion from them as of Aug. 21 2025.
Long way to go.
Meanwhile
For the current fiscal year 2025, the Bipartisan Policy Center reports a cumulative deficit of $1.6 trillion as of the end of July.
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The new tariffs except for part of the iron and steel levies didn't take effect until April or afterwards. That's 3-1/2 months. Annualize your 133.7 and assume most of that was collected since April and you shouldn't have any problem getting to 300 billion. And yes, we're running deficits as a % of GDP of about 6%. $300 billion is only about 1% of GDP, so the tariffs aren't going to come close to getting us to where we need to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1blackman1
From whom have these $300b supposedly been (or will be) raised. If it’s from consumers that’s a consumption tax which just raises the costs of goods. If it’s from the retailer and wholesalers who eat some of the tariff, then that's a tax on businesses. I thought you Republican types were anti-tax, particularly on businesses. Doesn't that essentially negate the 2017 and 2025 tax reductions on businesses that you, Lusty and TC brag added so much wealth across the board to the economy (though I'd say it made the rich richer and did little for the middle class - but that's a different discussion).
If we were just gonna tax business then we could have simply not lowered their taxes.
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The CBO's latest projection is that about $4 trillion will be cut from deficits over the next 10 years by the tariffs, which is about the same as what the CBO estimated the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) would add to deficits. HOWEVER, please note that if Democrats were in charge, they would have extended a lot of provisions in the BBB. Democrats certainly wouldn't have chosen to rescind the Trump tax cuts for anyone in the upper middle income class on down.
That said, for nth time, the tariffs suck. I agree with your post in Vitaman's thread, that you'd prefer a sales tax because it's transparent and the consumer knows how much he's paying the government. But the big reason is that tariffs reduce the benefits we receive from comparative advantage. There are some things that Mexicans and Chinese and Canadians do a lot better than we do, and there are some things that we're much better at than they are. We're all more prosperous when we do what we do best. You're better off lawyering and letting farmers, ranchers, slaughter houses, food processers, and supermarkets put the food on your table instead of doing it in all in your backyard and basement. The same with countries. We're not going to benefit, as Howard Lutnick says, from screwing screws in iphones.
Based on my insiders, who know their shit, the tariffs are regressive taxation at its worst. For example, the foreign supply chain and the U.S. retailers of upmarket clothing (sold by, say, Victoria's Secret or higher end department stores) have absorbed much of the cost of the tariffs. By lowering their margins, they've been able to avoid raising prices a lot. On the other hand, the foreign suppliers can't drop their prices on what they sell to Walmart, because the margins are so thin. That is, if they drop their prices to try to partially make up for tariffs they lose money. Walmart's margins suck too. They make their money on volume. So Walmart can't absorb the tariffs either. Who bears the cost increase? Like you said, the consumer. The Walmart shopper. The people who can least afford to pay higher prices.
You have not however caught me in a gotcha moment. Like I've said repeatedly, the problem is our inefficient federal government spends too much money. When you raise taxes and feed the beast in Washington D.C., you lower GDP growth and you hurt the workingman, the businesses, the investors, and the taxpayers. We need to cut federal expenditures across the board, 8% or whatever. That's the best solution. Let the states and the localities take up any slack. They're much more efficient than the bozos in D.C.
And if you want to raise the federal corporate tax rate back to 35%, where it was before 2018, you're way out of the Democratic Party mainstream. Only people like Sanders and Warren want to do that, because the sane Democrats realize it would be plain stupid. Like you say, that's for another thread, along with your mistaken belief that upper income earners are undertaxed. This thread is about ME and the eccie fiscal hawks.
