| Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Trumpian math: Two nonsense numbers that don't add up President Donald Trump often brags about how much money the United States is supposedly gathering from the tariffs he's imposed on imports. For instance: "On trade and other things, we're doing great. We're taking in billions and billions of dollars. … We were losing $2 billion a day. … This is the biggest deal ever made. Now we're making $3 billion a day." He said this on April 14. A few days before the president made these comments, we gave Four Pinocchios to Peter Navarro, the president's senior counselor, for claiming that Trump's tariffs would raise $600 billion a year, or $6 trillion over 10 years. We showed that Navarro appeared to have assumed that a 20 percent tariff on $3 trillion of imports would result in a bonanza — without considering the effects of people changing their buying habits when tariffs increase, countries retaliating and the subsequent impact on other revenue sources. Outside organizations, such as the Tax Foundation and the Budget Lab at Yale University, used sophisticated models to estimate that the overall tariff revenue would end up being closer to $2.4 trillion, or about $660 million a day. But it turns out that Navarro's math, while nonsensical, is even more conservative than Trump's math. Navarro estimated a little over $1.6 billion a day. Trump almost doubles that — to $3 billion a day. And how was Joe Biden losing $2 billion a day? Best we can tell, Trump was talking about something completely different — and equally wrong. To read the full fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating, click the link below. |
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