Fox Business host Neil Cavuto said Tuesday that President Trump was “lying” when he claimed that U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods had taken in $100 billion in revenue for the government.
In an interview with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Tuesday regarding Trump’s trade policies, Cavuto asked: “He uses a figure to talk about, ‘The tariffs have actually been very good to us. We have gotten $100 billion from the Chinese.’ Do you know where he got that figure?”
“I suppose he took the additional tariffs [the U.S. has imposed] against the amount that they import into us,” the senator replied.
Cavuto replied that that the math didn’t seem correct: “I don’t think he said that, senator, but who are we to quibble over details like this? A billion here, a billion there. I can go $35 billion, maybe up to $39 billion, maybe $40 billion, but when you’re lumping that together with items that we sell abroad to China, you’re lying.”
The response left Grassley stuttering, and Cavuto moved on to a different topic.
Cavuto was apparently referring to a claim Trump made in a series of tweets Friday that “The U.S. only sells China approximately 100 Billion Dollars of goods & products, a very big imbalance. With the over 100 Billion Dollars in Tariffs that we take in, we will buy agricultural products from our Great Farmers.”
Treasury Department data indicate that revenue from customs duties totaled just $41 billion in the last fiscal year.
