President Donald Trump wants to cut every adult American a $5,000 check. He’s calling it a dividend, as if the United States were a publicly traded company and its citizens were shareholders who’d been patiently waiting for a payout.
Trump unveiled the proposal on September 9 during the Republican Party’s first midterm convention in Dallas, framing the payment as a reward for the nation’s economic performance. The catch: Republicans need to hold both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterms for the money to flow.
The math is not on his side
The total price tag for the so-called Trump Dividend lands somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.35 trillion. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the entire annual discretionary budget of the federal government, dropped into bank accounts in one shot.
The US national debt currently sits at approximately $40 trillion. Adding another trillion-plus to the tab is the kind of math that makes deficit hawks lose sleep.
