Multiple economists laid into President Donald Trump Saturday for his “fuzzy math” cited alongside his many lofty promises or supposed achievements, including one who called Trump’s cited figures “meaningless.”
Speaking with Axios in a report published Saturday, Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow in business and economics at Pacific Research Institute, took a dive into Trump’s staggering claim that his tariff policy was generating $17 trillion in revenue.
"We could just say it'll raise a gazillion dollars,” Winegarden said, adding that Trump’s purported figures don’t account for cost-increases and revised revenue outlooks sparked by increased tariffs. “These are such ridiculous numbers that they're just as meaningless as that.”
Trump has routinely made lofty promises, many including specific figures, with another example being his pledge last week that his administration would be “reducing drug costs over the next year… by not 50% or 60%, [but] by 1,000%.”
"The Administration is committed to ensuring that drug companies make wealthy countries pay fairer rates for drugs and stop relying on Americans to subsidize the vast majority of global pharma research and development," said Kush Desai, White House spokesperson, in an email to Axios.
That same White House spokesperson added that Trump was correct in his assertion that his policies would, in fact, see drug costs reduced by 1,000% over the next year.
But for William Padula, a health economist at the University of Southern California, Trump’s claim carried no "mathematical explanation.”
"I don't have any mathematical explanation for that, other than we'd have to reconfigure our entire health system and infrastructure in order to operate more like other countries to get there," Padula said.
Trump’s so-called “reciprocal tariffs” were resumed Aug. 7 following a 90-day pause, and with the economic impacts already being felt across the American economy ahead of their implementation; prices have increased, job growth has slowed dramatically and inflation has ticked up.