Great news, my fellow Americans! Tariff revenue last month was way up. The government took in $17.4 billion from tariffs in April, nearly double the March haul of $9.6 billion. So far this year, the government has collected around $70 billion in tariff revenue. In 2024, with Sleepy Joe at the helm, it took in only about $77 billion for the whole year. Today, under the beautiful leadership of Pope Donald, we’re on pace for $210 billion in revenues. Maybe more!
Could Trump be right, then, that tariffs will pay for everything and one day replace the income tax?
No. Not even close. Not even kinda-sorta-maybe-in-dreamland close. This is a very under-discussed aspect of this whole tariff debate. Commentary typically focuses on whether the tariffs will really reduce the trade deficit and bring manufacturing back to the United States. Far too little attention is paid to one of Donald Trump’s chief claims, which he makes constantly: He fervently believes, or sure seems to, that the revenue from tariffs will be so great as to allow for the shutting down of the IRS and the end of income taxes.
Permit me to arm you with the answers to three fundamental questions. How much does the federal government spend every year? How much revenue does the federal government take in every year? And how much revenue might Trump’s tariffs generate once his plan is really up and running?
Answers to the first two questions: In 2024, the government spent about $6.75 trillion. In the same year, federal government revenues totaled $4.9 trillion. Yes, that made for a hefty budget deficit of $1.8 trillion, give or take, and that is certainly on the very high side, but that isn’t what we’re here to discuss today.
Now—let’s break down that revenue figure into its constituent categories. The largest chunk of that $4.9 trillion, about $2.4 trillion—or essentially half—came from income taxes. Another $1.7 trillion came from payroll taxes. About $530 billion came from corporate taxes (which Trump wants to lower again, so don’t expect that number to stay that high). Finally, $253 billion came from our old friend “Other.” The largest piece of the “Other” pie was excise taxes ($101 billion), which are taxes on things like airline tickets and so forth. “Other” also included the aforementioned $77 billion in tariff revenue, also known as customs duties.
In other words: To vaporize the IRS, Trump’s tariffs would need to produce $2.4 trillion in revenue. So, how’s that looking?
It’s looking insane is how it’s looking. As noted, the government is on pace to generate something north of $200 billion in tariff revenue this year. But let’s imagine that Trump’s wildest dreams are met or even exceeded. Will customs duties produce anywhere near $2.4 trillion?
No. They’ll come about as close as Publisher came to winning the Kentucky Derby Saturday (he finished fourteenth out of 19; my dream exacta of Journalism-Publisher went up in smoke around the first turn). Here’s a good report from USA Today that covers all the bases. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the tariffs will bring in, wouldn’t you know it, exactly $2.4 trillion. But oops—that’s over the next 10 years, not one, so it’s not even going to cover the first year of this wild experiment. Other estimates are similar. Even Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariffs adviser who made his small contribution to the 2024 deficit by forcing you and me to pay his housing tab for four months (in a federal prison in Miami, that is), estimates they’ll only bring in $600 billion a year. And that’s from the most passionate tariff evangelist in the country, in some ways even more ardent than Trump himself.
So, doing the math, we find that $2.4 trillion (income tax revenue) minus $600 billion (the most optimistic projection of tariff revenue) would leave the country $1.8 trillion short of current revenues. Or, using the Yale Budget Lab number ($240 billion a year in tariff revenue), the country would be left $2.16 billion in the hole.
So no: Tariff revenues won’t “make up for” income tax revenue. Not even anywhere near close. Yet Trump says this and says it and says it.
There is, as you probably know, a running debate about Trump’s lies: Does he actually believe X, or does he know X isn’t true but just says it anyway? Usually, consensus tends toward the latter explanation. But on this one, one suspects that he’s actually ill-informed enough to believe it. Somebody told him about how under William McKinley, tariffs paid for everything, and he liked the sound of that, without stopping to think that the federal government of the 1890s needed very little money because it did virtually nothing (federal spending today as a percentage of gross domestic product hovers somewhere around 20 percent; in the 1890s, it was more like 2 percent).
This brings us to a further wrinkle in this debate. Maybe Trump has no intention of replacing the whole $2.4 trillion. Maybe he and the Heritage Foundation and his Project 2025 operatives intend to shrink the government down to the size where a few hundred billion in revenue is plenty.
That would involve laying off the majority of the federal workforce and ending most of what the federal government does. The public already disapproves of what Elon Musk and DOGE are up to. Trying to take the government back to what it was in the 1890s would be an act of political suicide. Some red-hot ideologues of the right may want to do this, but I sincerely doubt Trump does. He probably doesn’t care that much, and he surely doesn’t want to see his approval rating hit a number that’s lower than the age of Bill Belichick’s girlfriend.
I get why people support Trump. If you’re angry at the system, you’ll vote for someone who is anti-system. If you’re enraged about the border, well, he’s your guy, and it is true that border crossings are down dramatically, although needless to say he and his people are doing some funny counting. And finally, let’s not forget that millions of Americans are getting their “news” from outlets that never utter a cross syllable about the man and regurgitate every word he says as biblical truth, so of course they support him since there’s nothing they’ve heard about to oppose.
But really. If you believe his nonsense about tariffs and the IRS, you’re drinking some Kool-Aid that even Ken Kesey wouldn’t have served. Or put it this way: If Trump really does fancy himself pope, well, he’s peddling a truckload of papal bull.
