The money ain’t there

Trump announced a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans win the midterms. Vance narrowed it within the hour to exclude the wealthy. Set the politics aside and just look at the arithmetic.

Every adult citizen at $5,000 runs somewhere around $1.2 trillion. Cap it at $100,000 household income and you’re still near $750 billion. Tariff revenue for the first ten months of fiscal 2026 came in around $154 billion, and the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that the statute used doesn’t authorize those tariffs at all, so the government has been refunding them.

And this isn’t the first promise like it. The $2,000 tariff dividend from November 2025 never arrived. Neither did the DOGE savings return or the HSA deposits.

The money isn’t there. Which means it gets monetized, which means inflation, which is the same thing a lot of us warned about during the COVID payments. You cannot fix people’s money not going far enough by printing more of it.

The actual relief was always to stop taxing people this hard. That option existed. They had the House, the Senate and the presidency, and reconciliation was available to address both taxing and spending. They chose not to use it.

Support whoever you want. Just don’t turn off your arithmetic when it’s your guy.