Three Ways You Can Tell Trump Is Lying about Tariff Rebates - emptywheel

"First, Trump promised he'd give all the non-rich $2000 rebates from his unlawful tariffs. Then, he claimed there'd still be money leftover after he had sent people "free" money. Then, he accused Democrats of making numbers up. Then, he said it would create a national security crisis if the Supreme Court made him give back money he raised unlawfully. But there are three ways you can tell Trump is just as full of shit as he always is."

"Doing the simple arithmetic, the country has 340 million people. If 10 percent of these people fit Trump's definition of high-income, and therefore don't get the rebate, roughly 300 million people would get the checks. At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes. Since he's already $330 billion short,"

Tariff revenue cannot cover a proposed $2,000 per-person rebate for non-high-income Americans because the arithmetic does not support the claim. With roughly 300 million recipients at $2,000 each, the payout would total about $600 billion, exceeding current tariff collections by more than double and leaving a $330 billion shortfall. The rebate would add substantially to an already projected $1.8 trillion deficit and increase national debt. Claims that tariffs produce surplus funds relied on flawed economic reasoning such as appealing to the Laffer Curve and contradicted prior promises to repay unlawfully collected tariffs to plaintiffs.

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