Early 2025 the airwaves were thick with the kind of panic you’d expect if someone announced free kale smoothies at the Burning Man.
“Tariffs will crush the economy!” screech the cable news anchors, their faces twisted like they just bit into a lemon dipped in regret.
“Prices will skyrocket! Jobs will evaporate!
Donald J. Trump is single-handedly dragging us back to the Stone Age—minus the affordable flint tools!”
Democrats, ever the prophets of peril, lined up like a bad sequel to The Day After Tomorrow, assuring us that Trump’s tariff renaissance would be the fiscal equivalent of Y2K, but with actual meltdowns instead of frozen servers.
Cut to today, and… crickets. Not a peep. Why?
Because, in the immortal words of that one uncle who always wins at Monopoly, it worked. Yeah, you heard that right. The big, bad tariffs aren’t just not killing us—they’re padding the federal coffers like a Mafia-rigged slot Vegas machine.
Trump’s tariff income is chipping away at the deficit mountain that Democrats spent four years pretending was a feature, not a bug. The same folks who swore this was economic Armageddon are now too busy lawyering up to admit along with being crooks who tried to stop Trump, they are also wrong on tariffs.
You only need to look back a couple of months or so to see how much the news was dominated with talks of tariffs.
Pundits on MSNBC were practically holding séances to summon the ghost of Smoot-Hawley, that infamous 1930 tariff hike that Leftists wield like a rusty Excalibur.
“See? Tariffs cause depressions!”
It’s like a comedy roast, but instead of jokes, it’s economists in tweed jackets forecasting bread lines by Easter. Fast-forward to reality, and the outcome? Not exactly the Mad Max wasteland they peddled. Cue the cash register cha-ching.
In January, before Trump’s tariffs were announced, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had projected that customs revenues would total $80 billion in fiscal year 2025, which is close to the average of the previous five years. However, as a result of the tariff hikes, through July the revenue totaled $136 billion. Almost $30 billion was collected in July alone, per Treasury reports. And that was just the appetizer. By August, the U.S. collected over $30 billion in tariff revenues alone, pushing 2025 totals to a jaw-dropping $183.1 billion. That’s not a typo—$183 billion and counting, on track to obliterate the 2024 totals before Halloween hits.”
Historically, tariff revenue has never accounted for more than about 2% of total federal government revenues in the modern era. And with the tariffs that are in place today, that could go up to 5% or perhaps even higher,” said Shai Akabas, the vice president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, to NPR. Now the CBO says this means there will be a greater budgetary effect as well. “We project that increases in tariffs implemented during the period from January 6, 2025, to August 19 will decrease primary deficits (which exclude net outlays for interest) by $3.3 trillion if the higher tariffs persist for the 2025‒2035 period,” said the recent report from the federal agency.
Three-point-three trillion. Not pocket change; but enough to finance a Leftist war in a country in [insert country here].
Earlier this month, Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, estimated the Trump administration’s tariff efforts will bring in a “very significant” $350 billion in annual revenue.
Tariff Cheaters?
And over at Goldman Sachs, analysts are scratching their heads not over catastrophe, but over clever foxes dodging the toll booth.
Export data indicates increased rates of transshipments from China to the U.S. through third-party countries—a similar pattern observed during the 2018 trade war. The tariff evasion taking place today could impact more than $200 billion in U.S. imports, costing the U.S. $40 billion in tariff revenue if efforts to curb the sidestepping aren’t mitigated, bank analysts Joseph Briggs and Megan Peters said in a report. Dive into the dodging details here.
Even with the cheaters, we’re raking it in. Plug those leaks, and we’re talking deficit Armageddon—in the good way.
This isn’t some fluke; it’s Trump channeling the ghosts of American economic history and the kind conservatives have been whispering about in think-tank basements since Reagan was wise-cracking about welfare queens.
Tariffs aren’t a newfangled Trumpism—they’re as American as apple pie laced with protectionism.
Flash back to the Gilded Age, that roaring stretch from 1870 to 1900 when the U.S. morphed from scrappy upstart to industrial juggernaut. Republicans, those crafty forebears of modern conservatism, championed high protective tariffs averaging around 50% on dutiable imports. Why? To shield fledgling American factories from the cheap flood of British textiles and German steel, letting homegrown industries sprout like weeds in a well-fertilized garden. The result? Explosive growth: Railroads snaking across the continent, steel mills belching prosperity in Pittsburgh, and a GDP that ballooned faster than a politician’s promises. Sure, there was poverty in the shadows—immigrants toiling in tenements—but that’s the gritty reality of building an empire, not the utopia of handouts the Left romanticizes.
Contrast that with the free-trade fever dream peddled by Democrats since Grover Cleveland’s mustache-twirling days. They framed tariffs as revenue-only tools, low and lovable. Because who needs protection when you’ve got cheap imports?
By the 20th century, and you get the Smoot-Hawley debacle of 1930, where tariffs spiked to 60% amid the Depression’s early throes. Liberals still trot that out like a participation trophy, ignoring how retaliatory tariffs from Europe turned a bad recession into a global gut-punch. But Smoot-Hawley wasn’t the villain; it was a symptom of a world unraveling under war debts and protectionist ping-pong. Done right—like Trump’s surgical strikes—tariffs aren’t blunt clubs; they’re scalpels, carving out space for American workers while filling Uncle Sam’s wallet.
The Left loves to cosplay as blue-collar saviors, right?
“Tariffs hurt the little guy!” they wail, as if outsourcing to sweatshops in Shenzhen is some badge of progressive honor. But data doesn’t lie—unless you’re a fact-checker at Politico. Under Trump’s first-term tariffs in 2018, manufacturing jobs ticked up by 400,000 before COVID crashed the party.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the pattern holds: No earthquake, just steady revenue without the apocalypse. Tariff revenue has increased by tens of billions year-over-year, but economists doubt tariffs can replace income taxes or spur widespread reshoring—yet even they admit the sky isn’t falling. Growth has not plummeted. Also, the revenue from tariffs is enormous. An international trade war has not broken out. Trump’s tariffs are ‘great’ so far, as one Fox analysis quipped, with totals skyrocketing past 2024 levels in mere months.
Now, the deficit dance—oh, this is where the sarcasm sings. Remember when Democrats treated the national debt like a Vegas buffet, piling on trillions for “Build Back Better” boondoggles that built back nothing?
Inflation Reduction Act? More like Inflation Acceleration Act, with its green energy giveaways that subsidized bird-chopping windmills while gas prices hit seven bucks a gallon. Trump strolls in, slaps on tariffs, and suddenly the CBO’s singing a different tune: Those hikes could shrink primary deficits by $3.3 trillion over a decade, plus another $700 billion in interest savings.
That’s right—$4 trillion total deficit haircut, courtesy of the man they called a fiscal illiterate.
Will households pay a price? Sure, maybe a nickel more for your imported yoga mat. But compare that to the Biden-era squeeze, where eggs cost as much as a therapy session. Fox tallies a massive haul in Trump’s first six months back: $300 billion estimated for 2025, versus a measly $35 billion in 2015 under Obama.
The irony piles up like unpaid parking tickets at a DNC fundraiser. Democrats, who spent the Obama years lecturing on “fair trade” while NAFTA’s ghosts haunted Rust Belt towns, now ghost the tariff topic entirely. No mea culpas, no “Well, shucks, Donnie did good.” Just radio silence, punctuated by the occasional TikTok rant about microaggressions.
It’s as if admitting success would shatter their victimhood mirror. Meanwhile, conservatives—those alleged dinosaurs of economic thought—are vindicated. Heritage Foundation wonks have long argued for “the art of the tariff deal,” projecting trillions in revenue from smart hikes. That’s not policy; that’s poetry.
What happens next?
As Trump eyes 30% on EU goods and more IEEPA flexes, revenue could top $2 trillion over the decade. Use it wisely.
Shore up Social Security and even offer private-sector alternatives. Turbocharge infrastructure without the pork, or—gasp—actually cut taxes for the makers, not the takers. The Left will howl about “regressive” this and “corporate greed” that, but deep down, they know: When something works, the only response is to ignore it.
In the end, this tariff triumph isn’t just about bucks—it’s about backbone. America, under Trump, isn’t begging at the global table; we’re setting it. Democrats can keep their crickets; we’ll take the cash. And if they ever pipe up again? We’ll have the receipts. Billions, no trillions of them. Because in the grand stand-up of politics, nothing lands like a setup from the experts followed by a Trump twist. Thank you, folks—tip your waitstaff.
