A $5,000 check would cost the US somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.35 trillion
TOI correspondent from Washington: The Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday night was to be a celebration of two years of Trump presidency to gee up ranks for the Nov 3 mid-term elections. Instead, the MAGA boss made headlines after laying out something that sounded less like an upbeat policy and more like a deadbeat delivering dubious promises: $5,000 for every American adult – provided Republicans win both chambers of Congress. At roughly 240–270 million adult Americans, a $5,000 check would cost Uncle Sam somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.35 trillion – when the country is already drowning in a $ 40 trillion debt. The nomenclature was striking: A dividend normally comes from profits, but the federal government is running a deficit of roughly $2 trillion a year. There is also the issue of tariff math: the administration has suggested tariffs could help finance the dividend, but analysts say tariff revenue is nowhere near sufficient to cover a $1.2 trillion-plus program.
Because the payment would go to everyone regardless of how they voted ––or whether they voted at all, a New Mexico (or New America) attorney told AP that the proposal would be legal.
“This is a campaign promise,” he explained. Trump also said the money would come with a caveat – it would have to be spent within the US “We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money…We don’t want you going to China, to Germany. You got to spend the money in the United States,” he told the faithful, with no explanation on how this would be tracked.
Political pundits pointed immediately to a small trillion dollar problem in the proposal, aside from it looking suspiciously like an attempt to buy the election: Congress would actually have to approve the money, nobody has explained where the lolly would come from, and the arithmetic is airy. Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put the problem rather bluntly: “The idea that we’ve had fiscal success is backwards and bordering on laughable. We don’t have surpluses to give away. Critics immediately characterized the announcement as an attempt to buy the election – a not unfamiliar tactic in electoral democracies, including in India. Yet that is not the same thing, legally, as offering money to an individual in exchange for his or her vote. “It’s not a payment to individuals to try to get them to vote in a particular way. And after the Supreme Court ruled in February that the administration’s sweeping IEEPA tariffs were unlawful, the government has been dealing with tariff refunds as well.
The convention itself supplied conflicting visuals, with Trump insisting the 21,000-seat American Airlines Center was packed, while cameras panned to large empty sections. Several vulnerable Republican lawmakers and candidates skipped the gathering altogether, preferring not to have their own campaigns photographed next to an increasingly polarizing president. There is an additional reason Republicans are getting increasingly fidgety. Democrats, ahead in many polls, have already been preparing an aggressive oversight agenda should they regain control, including subpoenas and investigations of Trump administration actions.