In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bragged about the "amazing" revenue that the Trump administration's tariffs are delivering to the U.S. Treasury.
"The tariff revenues are amazing: $700 billion a year," Lutnick told Shannon Bream. "That's just net new money the government never had before. You take that for 10 years, that's $7 trillion."
Ignore, if you can, the still bizarre (but increasingly common) sight of a Republican executive official bragging about how much money the federal government has extracted from the economy. Similarly, try to ignore Lutnick's questionable calculation of how much revenue the tariffs will generate—the best estimates right now suggest they will generate between $2.5 trillion and $2.7 trillion over the next decade, not the $7 trillion that Lutnick claims. (But those estimates are tricky things, given the lack of certainty surrounding all of this.)
