PoliticusUSA is ad-free and independent thanks to the support of readers like you. You can support our work by becoming a subscriber.
Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said, according to an X post from Jeff Stein of The Washington Post that Trump is planning on imposing $600 billion worth of tariffs per year for ten years:
White House aide Peter Navarro today: Trump’s tariffs will raise $600 billion per year, or $6 trillion over a 10 year period Seems to reflect our reporting that Trump wants to go absolutely enormous on the tariffs, regardless of short-term economic consequences
Video of Navarro:
To put this into context, Trump’s proposed tariffs would be 2.2% of GDP.
Here is a chart from The Tax Foundation of the largest tax increases as a percentage of GDP in US history:
1941 falls in the line because that is the year that Pearl Harbor was attacked and the US entered World War II, but the world was at war in 1941.
The other tax increases in 1950 and 1951 were during the Korean War, and 1943 was World War II.
The largest peacetime tax increase in US history was 1968, and Trump tariffs are double that as a percentage of GDP.
The Center For Economic And Policy Research noted that Republicans lost their minds when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oversaw much smaller tax increases, “By comparison, the tax hike that Bill Clinton pushed through in 1993, primarily on high-end taxpayers, came to 0.66 percent of GDP. The tax increase that President Obama pushed through in 2010 to cover the projected cost of Obamacare came to 0.43 percent of GDP.”
The Obama and Clinton tax increases were about one-fifth and one-third as big as what Trump wants to do with tariffs.
