Tariffs Bring In $16 Billion in April, Cutting Into the Deficit

The media loves increasing tax revenues, except when they might benefit a Republican.

Customs duties totaled $16.3 billion for the month, some 86% above the $8.75 billion collected during March and more than double the $7.1 billion a year ago.

The fiscal year-to-date deficit fell to $1.05 trillion, which is still 13% higher than a year ago.

Receipts from U.S. tariffs hit a record level in April as revenue from President Donald Trump's trade war started kicking in.

Customs duties totaled $16.3 billion for the month, some 86% above the $8.75 billion collected during March and more than double the $7.1 billion a year ago, the Treasury Department reported Monday.

That brought the year-to-date total for the duties up to $63.3 billion and more than 18% ahead of the same period in 2024. Trump instituted 10% across-the-board tariffs on U.S. imports starting April 2, which came on top of other select duties he had leveled previously.

While the U.S. is still running a massive budget deficit, the influx in tariffs helped shave some of the imbalance for April, a month in which the Treasury generally runs a surplus because of the income tax filing deadline hitting mid-month.

While the media scrambles to portray Trump's economy negatively, they stood by as Biden's economic spinners lied about job growth under Biden.

The Biden administration's phony jobs boom just went up in smoke. For months, it paraded numbers around like everything was fine, telling Americans the economy was roaring back, that job creation was on fire, and that "Bidenomics" was working. But the truth, long suspected by anyone trying to pay the bills, is now confirmed by the government's own data: those jobs never existed.

According to new figures released this week, the 399,000 jobs the Biden team claimed were created between July and September of last year have completely vanished. Not only did the economy not add those jobs, but it also lost 1,000 private-sector jobs during that period.

...

Nearly 400,000 phantom jobs were quietly wiped off the books. And this isn't just a one-time discrepancy. Month after month during Joe Biden's term, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published inflated job estimates, only to revise them downward later, long after the headlines had already done their PR damage for the White House.

Antoni breaks it down further: "Under Biden, these revisions were abnormal in magnitude and direction, being revised down with unusual frequency." No kidding. In fact, the BLS's more comprehensive annual benchmark, released earlier this year, revised down Biden's job numbers from March 2023 to March 2024 by a jaw-dropping 598,000 jobs.

That's not just bad math; that's deception on a national scale.

Now that the Trump Economy is starting to roar again, the media is writing stories about why these good things aren't really good things, Bigot.

A big contributor to the falling inflation rate was, get this, a big fall in US gas prices.

The media needs you to know that low gas prices are bad, Racists.

I saw another headline, I think from CNN, that said that US cars hadn't seen any uptick in prices, despite Trump's tariffs. The headline continued, "...and that's not necessarily a good thing."

Fuck you.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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