Side topic, but this number puts into how crazy it was for trump[0] to go on tariff war against enemies and friends alike. All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.

Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?

$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!

Masterminds!

…and now they need to refund it.

NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.

[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_bud...

Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?

Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.

You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.

Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.

Maybe I don't understand as I'm an outsider, but as per my recent comment on this topic [0], I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.

I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47238951

> tariff war against enemies

This is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.

I am old enough to remember when the great minds at DOGE found $10T a year of fraudulent Social Security spending which would have cut the total governement spending from $7T a year to negative $3T.

The DOGE refund cheque is of course, in the mail.

The biggest damage is the souring of relations with other countries, who now no longer see the US as a reliable business partner. They have nudged countries in the EU to rather look to China. The longer Trump is in office, the bigger the damage gets. The long term course might already be set away from the US and towards China. The loss for the US cannot even be estimated yet.

Also the US is working hard on losing their military dominance. Engaging in unnecessary wars, offending its allies left and right, who are now starting to invest more into their own military, since they have learned, that they cannot rely on the US any longer, while China plays the catch-up game and is getting closer to US military capability every year.

Reputational damage is enormous of course and the US hands China easy PR wins after wins.

This seems to be the current trend. Projecting this into the future, it seems likely, that in 10, 20, 30 years from now, the most powerful global player might be China, instead of the US. Obviously, in decades a lot can happen. Future US administrations however have got a lot of repair work cut out for them. How can they convince international partners, that this does not repeat in the future, the next time a crazy administration is elected? Can they at all? Or can they fix the political landscape in their own country in that timespan? It kinda looks like their are stuck.

They need to refund it *with interest*, according to filings cited in the article.

The rest is financed by debt. The theft-class stole the rest from the govt thru debt, and expect the rest of us and the following generations to deal with the fallout while they sit on top of their obscene gobs of cash insulated from the fire they created.

The dude is a moron: to think there was any thought behind this is to be insane.

Friends? America has no friends, only client states.

The $130B is only part of the economic costs of the tariffs. Many companies and people changed their buying behavior, either paying more to a domestic company or maybe a company in a country with a lower tariff rate or changed their behavior to not require an item all together. We've also heard about small companies that have gone out of business.

I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.

> they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!

No one is or ever was planning on fixing any "holes".

Trump is drilling holes all over the boat and taking what he can.

After he's dead, others will have to deal with the sinking ship.

That $130B will pay for 4 months of the Iran war with a current run rate of <checks clipboard> $1B per day.

We’re definitely not going to get even a reduction in healthcare costs any time soon.

and from all of this they got only $130B ?

I wonder if your thoughts would be any different if they managed to get enough to actually pay off the deficit?

The point is to bankrupt the country so the robber barons can buy up all the assets for pennies on the dollar.

The purpose of the tariffs was to strong-arm countries into unfair trade deals, not to collect revenue

this reminds me of the Indian government's (read Modi's) demonetization efforts of 2016 which caused 80+ deaths and huge headaches for the common people. In the end, more than 99.3% of the demonetized money came back in circulation. Elect a clown, expect a circus. true for the oldest democracy in the world and also true for the largest democracy.

The point of tariffs is to discourage foreign goods from entering the U.S. market. Has anyone ever read a book?

I had the same thought, but really I think a lot of it is just spectacle for his more gullible followers.

I mean, FFS--we have a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes and was elected anyway!

You'd have to be pretty gullible to think that raising taxes on imported goods won't result in price hikes at the checkout counter.

No, Trump manufactured negotiating leverage out of thin air— nothing, really. He extracted concessions on something like a bluff. Plus, didn’t he also extract a budget that in retrospect wasn’t appropriate had the tariff revenue been removed?

> Astronomical tariffs [...] and from all of this they got only $130B ?

Which is it? A number can't be small and large at the same time.

It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.

Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.

The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.

When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?

It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.

"Trump brags in Oval Office that his billionaire pals made a killing in stocks after he pulled the plug on tariffs"

> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/trump-brags-oval-office-billionair...

> All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.

Sounds a bit like Brexit.

Hedging in case Argentina might need another bailout.

-They only got 130B -They planned to fix all this with 100B?

I see what you did there. 70B eh? They only got 50B. A paltry 20B?

The real number though, was gotten in a relatively short time. And now replacement tariffs are on the way. And many companies have re-thought of manufacturing outside US with the higher tariffs always being the possibility in the future too.

I mean 130 billion is a significant amount of money, and it's more remarkable given the tax is unnoticeable to the average consumer and primarily impacted foreign manufacturers (either forcing them to move to the US or more friendly countries). The deficit wasn't built in two years and I don't think it could be solved in two years either.

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