Donald Trump’s ‘External Revenue Service’ Is As Stupid As It Sounds

Guess who foots the bill for Trump's plan to tax foreign countries?

This is not a good idea.

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC – I didn’t think anything could be dumber than Donald Trump’s insistence that tariffs on imported consumer goods are paid by foreign governments. Then he started to announce his whack-pack cabinet nominees, and I thought, nope, can’t get dumber than this all new rogues gallery of weirdos and nincompoops.

But then I heard the news yesterday that Donald plans to create something called the External Revenue Service, tasked with collecting tariffs from foreign governments even though foreign governments don’t pay tariffs.

For the eleventy-billionth time, let’s be clear about this. Tariffs are taxes on foreign imports, paid to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency by American importers like Costco and Walmart, which then pass along the fees to consumers – you and me – in the form of higher prices. In other words, we pay the tariffs. Not China. Not Canada. Not Mexico.

Consequently, anyone who’s concerned about prices, so much so that they voted for Donald Trump, stupidly voted for higher prices on imported items like food, clothing, technology, and so forth. Naturally, many of these voters cast ballots for Donald despite the tariffs because he serially lied about who pays the taxes. And they believed him – they believed the world’s most notorious con-man after all these years.

It’s also worth noting that by imposing higher tariffs on imports, Donald will trigger foreign governments to impose retaliatory tariffs on American exports, making the products we produce here and ship overseas less desirable to foreign customers, thus hurting American manufacturing. Incidentally, Donald presided over a manufacturing recession during his first term, prior to COVID. Under President Biden, domestic manufacturing is booming again…until Donald restarts his trade wars.

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So, if Donald implements, say, a 20 percent tariff on all imported goods, it would amount to a 20 percent tax on consumers, costing us around $4.5 trillion over 10 years. These numbers, by the way, are pulled from the conservative Tax Foundation, via Reuters.

Enter the cockamamie External Revenue Service.

I wonder if Donald ran this idea by the impotent weirdo billionaires at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Probably not. He’s so opposed to a massive federal bureaucracy that he’s creating not one but two new government agencies, one of which serves no purpose, the ERS, while the other is tasked with reducing the size of government. Worse, the tariffs we pay for the products we buy would ostensibly be used to pay for the ERS rather than something useful like healthcare, infrastructure, or mitigating the climate crisis.

And much like his ridiculousness about Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, no one asked for another government agency to collect tariffs that aren’t paid by foreign governments in the first place. I don’t recall the Red Hat entertainment complex screeching about forming such an agency, especially given how one exists already. According to a new NPR poll, Donald’s tariff proposal is supported by just 31 percent of voters.

Once again, he’s pretending to be a big boy president by proposing ludicrous, redundant nonsense no one asked for. Real leaders respond to the practical needs of the people with rational solutions that serve logical purposes. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, for example, was created by President Obama due to overwhelming public demand for reform in the health insurance industry. It lowers costs and shields consumers from corporate abuses, making our lives easier and healthier. The External Revenue Service, on the other hand, is entirely redundant, useless, and helps no one.

On the upside, once regular people notice that Donald significantly raised prices at the grocery store, and then created a redundant agency to collect these taxes, there will be an inevitable backlash. If there’s one thing we learned from the 2024 election, it’s that felonies, a botched response to a pandemic, and a violent insurrection don’t matter to millions of voters. But prices sure do. And Donald’s MAGA Republican Party is about to find that out the hard way.

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