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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Chamath @ 01:00:07Inconclusive
economy
Under the existing Trump-era tariff regime, U.S. federal receipts will come in approximately $300–$400 billion per year higher than prior forecasts, on an ongoing annual basis, assuming current tariff levels and trade balances persist.
we are run rating 300 to $400 billion above Forecast in terms of our receipts, meaning the revenues that we will take in. And you get to that number by looking at the last three months of tariffs and forecasting forward, assuming a reasonable balance here... The mathematical reality is that this is actually going to work out much better for us than we anticipated, and it's going to be somewhere in the range of 300 to $400 billion of extra revenue per year.View on YouTube
Explanation

Available data so far show a sizable boost to federal receipts from tariffs, but not yet the sustained $300–$400 billion per year above prior forecasts that Chamath described, and the longer‑run effect still depends on policy choices and trade flows that are not yet known.

  1. What the official forecasts said before the tariff shock: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) June 2024 baseline projected FY 2025 federal revenues of about $5.04 trillion, and its updated January 2025 outlook projected $5.2 trillion (17.1% of GDP).(epicforamerica.org) Those baselines largely pre‑dated the full scale of the 2025 Trump‑era tariff expansion.

  2. What actually happened in FY 2025: Treasury data summarized by Reuters show that total federal receipts in FY 2025 were $5.235 trillion, only about $35 billion above CBO’s January 2025 forecast and roughly $200 billion above the older June 2024 forecast – well short of the extra $300–$400 billion per year that Chamath suggested.(reuters.com) Customs‑duty (tariff) revenues did jump sharply, hitting a record $195 billion in FY 2025, up $118 billion from the prior year, but that is still far below a $300–$400 billion increment on its own.(reuters.com)

  3. What newer projections say about the future: After the new tariffs were in place, CBO released an updated analysis estimating that tariffs implemented in 2025 would reduce primary deficits by about $3.3 trillion and interest costs by another $0.7 trillion over 2025–2035, a total deficit reduction of roughly $4 trillion over 11 years.(americanbusinesstimes.com) That implies an average annual improvement on the order of $300–$360 billion versus the earlier baseline, largely via higher tariff receipts. Separately, press coverage notes that if current high tariff collections persist, annual tariff revenue alone could approach the mid‑hundreds of billions of dollars by 2026.(axios.com)

  4. Why this is still unresolved: Chamath’s normalized claim is conditional and forward‑looking: that under the existing tariff regime, federal receipts will on an ongoing annual basis come in roughly $300–$400 billion above prior forecasts, assuming current tariff levels and trade balances persist. To fully validate or falsify that, we would need several years of realized data with those tariffs in place and stable trade patterns. As of late 2025, we have only one fiscal year of partial implementation (showing at most ≈$200 billion above older forecasts) plus CBO’s long‑term projections, which are themselves contingent and uncertain.

Because (a) realized receipts so far fall materially short of the stated $300–$400 billion per year gap, but (b) official forward projections now do roughly align with that magnitude if the tariffs endure, and (c) the prediction explicitly depends on assumptions about future policy and trade that have not yet been resolved, the evidence is not strong enough to call the prediction clearly right or clearly wrong. It remains too early and too assumption‑dependent to judge definitively, so the outcome is best characterized as inconclusive at this point.