On Thursday Donald Trump claimed that the US would start paying off its debt, “we have $38 trillion in debt, which we’ll start paying off pretty soon with the tariff money coming in.” That isn’t true even close to being true.
On Wednesday, the Treasury Department said that tariff revenue was $30.75 billion in November. The month before that it was $31.35 billion. It was $31.36 billion two months ago. So it has been averaging about $31 billion a month. At that rate tariff revenue $372 billion a year. That would hardly make a dent in $38,000 billion in debt.
But it gets worse, as the debt is the accumulation of previous deficits. Deficits being the amount that US government spends in a year beyond the amount of revenue it takes in. According to the Treasury Department, in the fiscal year that ended in September, the US ran $1.775 trillion deficit even with months of Trump’s heightened tariffs. So instead of paying off debt, the US is going continue to increase its debt.
It’s unclear if Donald Trump really believes that the tariffs could pay off the debt or if this just to try to avoid being criticized for the growing debt under his Presidency.
Leave a Reply