With America’s global average tariff now over 17%, both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Budget Lab at Yale University are now projecting that tariff revenue will make total U.S. federal tax revenue higher in Fiscal Year 2026 than in FY2025, despite the large federal tax cuts, and that tariff revenue will be $250 billion or more. Given that most of the tariffs are obviously threatening and/or punitive, even the President and his tariff leprechaun, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have stopped calling them “reciprocal”; their immediate objective—as with crypto “stablecoins”—is clearly to produce revenue and hold off an explosion of America’s rapidly expanding and increasingly short-term-speculative debt bubble.
Both CBO and the Budget Lab, while projecting the possibility (claimed by the White House) of $2.5-2.7 trillion in tariff revenue over 10 years, point out that such tariffs will shrink the U.S. economy and GDP overall, and therefore will taper off, especially with inflation, unless renegotiated.
