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The US economy took in billions more than it spent in June. But that extra money came from our pockets, not magically from foreign coffers.
Headlines have been popping up that the US budget unexpectedly flipped into a surplus in June this year. The surplus was attributed to funds generated by tariffs. No doubt this will have Donald Trump once again crowing about how smart he is compared to everyone else.
But let’s not forget the basic facts involved in tariffs: other countries do not pay them, we do. Tariffs are a direct tax on the American public and American businesses.
This video from the Yale Budget Lab lays out the facts very simply:
The fact that this will encourage Trump to continue his tariff gambit even more is the worst news in this situation. This is a man who bankrupted casinos through financial mismanagement. Now he and his mouthpieces are going to be screaming about how he’s actually a financial “genius.”
Meanwhile anyone who can do elementary arithmetic can see the insanity of this picture. Trump’s adherents are once again going to be talking about how he’s just been playing 4-dimensional chess—whatever that is—while he’s really just cheating at checkers and yelling, “King me!”
Trump is literally stealing money right out of the US economy while rampantly cutting investment into the economy. And make no mistake, investment in the US economy is the primary purpose of our taxes as individuals and businesses.
This is a crux of the biscuit. Our legitimate tax payments are no longer the total of funds being taken from our pockets. We’re also paying a tax on everything we buy that comes under the heading of tariffed products. It is a LOT of stuff and only growing by the day as Trump has another tantrum about some perceived slight by another country. The latest is his 50% tariff threat against Brazil because that country is prosecuting his buddy Jair Bolsonaro for insurrection and trying to overthrow an election. Sound familiar?
Trump’s primary delusion about tariffs is that other countries pay them. And since there’s no way in his mind that he can ever be wrong—about anything or any lie he has ever told—he’s sticking to it. And thus sticking it to us.
This is more than just the replay of American budget history. A quick survey of past administrations show clearly that Republican administrations increase budget deficits and Democratic ones reduce or eliminate them. Republicans are now going to claim, because of this unexpected result, that this pattern has been broken. This of course will completely ignore the massive deficit increases of Trump’s prior term. It will also ignore that the money generated from the tariffs comes from our pockets.
Trump wants to be seen as some sort of a brilliant economist when the opposite has been shown to be the case, for decades. So when one of his people chortle about how smart he has been with these tariffs, you can quote Capital One’s advertising tag line, “What’s in your wallet?”
Marty Kassowitz
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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