President Donald Trump said at his Cabinet meeting that next year he’ll be “giving back refunds out of the tariffs because we’ve taken in literally trillions dollars.”
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It’s not clear how that would work or if Trump could afford to do so without worsening the national debt, which he claims his tariffs will also cut.
The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that so far this year the U.S. government has collected $258.1 billion in tariffs. This revenue from taxes on imports is meaningfully higher than $90 billion collected at this point last year. But it’s not trillions, and it’s not clear how Trump could refund the taxes he imposed unilaterally by declaring an economic emergency.
The annual budget shortfall for the last fiscal year was $1.8 trillion, significantly higher than Trump’s tariff revenues.
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Still, Trump said he’s banking on tariffs supplanting income taxes, so much so that “at some point in the not too distant future, you won’t even have income tax to pay.”
