Trump's $5000 dollar stimulus check
This week President Trump told the country that if Republicans win the House and the Senate in November, every adult citizen in America gets five thousand dollars. For a married couple, that is ten thousand dollars landing in the bank account.
Today we are going to walk through it, start to finish. First, exactly what the President promised, who would get the money, and what has to happen for it to reach you. Second, where the money would come from, because one round of these checks costs more than a trillion dollars. And third, what happened the last time Washington mailed out checks on this scale, and what that tells us about this one.
The Promise.
On Monday, October twelfth, President Trump sat in front of a camera and made a promise straight to the American people. He said he is going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America five thousand dollars. He said Democrat policies will not allow it to happen, and that if Democrats win in November, they will raise your taxes and the country will fall into an economic depression. If Republicans win, he said, every one of you will have five thousand dollars in your pocket and economic success like this country has never seen before.
That video was not the first time he said it. It was at least the fourth.
He first floated the five thousand dollar payment at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas in September. He repeated it on September twenty eighth at an event in the Oval Office, and that is where he attached the condition that matters most. In his words, if the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them. He said it again on October fourth. And now he has put it on video, three weeks out from the election.
So this is not an offhand comment. It is a campaign promise, made over and over, with a price tag and a deadline built into it. The deadline is November third.
Who Would Get It.
This is the first thing people want to know, and the answer has already moved once.
When the pledge first went out, the language was every United States citizen. That would have meant children too. Overnight, the wording flipped back to adults. The video on Monday says all adult citizens. So as of today, the promise is for adults who are American citizens. Not green card holders. Not people here on visas. Not anyone here illegally. Citizens who are eighteen and older.
Then there is the question of whether it means every adult or every working adult. Vice President JD Vance went on Fox News to defend the idea, and he called it, quote, fundamentally a dividend for American workers. That one word changes who gets paid. If the check only goes to people who are working, a retiree on Social Security does not get it, and neither does somebody who is out of work. The President's own words on Monday were all adult citizens. The Vice President's words were American workers. Until somebody writes it down in a bill, nobody can tell you which one it is.
And how many people are we talking about? The Tax Foundation built its estimate on roughly two hundred and fifty million adults. Two hundred and fifty million people, times five thousand dollars each. Keep that number in your head, because we are going to come back to it.
What Has To Happen First.
The President cannot send this money on his own. No President can. Under the Constitution, spending money is the job of Congress. A check like this has to be written into law, passed by the House, passed by the Senate, and signed.
That is why the condition is Republicans winning both chambers. And winning is only the first step.
Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, has said he will introduce legislation to fund it. The problem is the Senate filibuster. Most spending bills need sixty votes to get past it. Analysts who track the Senate say a bill like this is unlikely to get there, because even in a good year for Republicans, nobody is projecting sixty Republican senators. But there is a way around the filibuster. It is called budget reconciliation, and it lets certain spending bills pass the Senate with a simple majority of fifty one votes. That is exactly how the fourteen hundred dollar checks passed in twenty twenty one, and it is how Republicans passed their big tax law in twenty twenty five. So a five thousand dollar check could go through the same door, if Republicans hold both chambers and stick together.
So the path is there. Win the House, win the Senate, write the bill, and pass it. It has been done before, by both parties.
The Checks That Are Real.
Now, in fairness, there are two payments going out right now that are real, and I want to separate them from the five thousand dollar promise, because a lot of people are confusing them.
The first is a ninety dollar payment for some people on Medicare. The White House says more than twenty million people are eligible, out of about sixty four million enrolled. It is meant to help with Part B premiums, which now run about two hundred and three dollars a month for most people. If your Medicaid covers your premium, if you pay the higher income adjustment, or if you are on Medicare Advantage, you are not in line for it. That money comes out of a fund Congress already set up back in two thousand eight, called the Medicare Improvement Fund. That is why it can go out without a new vote.
The second is a five hundred dollar refund for nearly one million people who buy insurance on the federal Obamacare exchange in thirty states and do not get premium help. The White House says it is paying back fees that were overcharged under the last administration. Most of the people getting it earn more than four times the poverty line.
Both of those are going out this month, and both come from money the government already has. A five thousand dollar check would need new money, and a lot of it. We will get to that in a minute.
What Five Thousand Dollars Would Mean.
I am going to be straight with you. I would love to have five thousand dollars. Everybody listening to this would.
For a lot of families, that money would matter. It could pay off a credit card, catch up on a couple of months of rent, fix the car, or finally put something in savings. For a married couple, ten thousand dollars could be the difference between a hard year and an easy one.
So it is worth taking seriously. The President has put his name on it, he has repeated it, and there is a path through Congress if Republicans win. What nobody has explained yet is where the money comes from. And that is where we go next.
The Bill.
When the White House was asked how this would be paid for, its spokesman, Davis Ingle, defended the President's economic record and did not answer the question. A Treasury official asked the same thing could not explain it either. The best he offered was that the money starts to show up over time.
So let's do the math ourselves.
Two hundred and fifty million adults. Five thousand dollars each. The Tax Foundation puts the cost of one round at about one point two five trillion dollars. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is a nonpartisan budget watchdog, puts it at a little over one point two trillion. Either way, you are talking about more than a trillion dollars, for one check, one time.
To put that in perspective, one point two trillion dollars is more than the federal government spends on the entire military in a year. It would be one of the single largest payments the federal government has ever made at one time.
And that is just the first round. The way the President talks about it, this is a dividend, and a dividend is something you get more than once. If it is meant to come every year, the bill is one point two trillion dollars every year.
The Deficit.
Here is what the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that check would do to the national books.
Right now, the government is running a deficit of about five point eight percent of the size of the entire economy. That means every year, Washington spends more than it takes in, by an amount equal to almost six cents of every dollar this country produces. With one round of five thousand dollar checks in twenty twenty seven, the Committee says that deficit would jump to nine point four percent. The total deficit for that one year would hit about three point one trillion dollars.
The president of that group, Maya MacGuineas, called the proposal fiscally dangerous, economically backwards and fundamentally unserious.
Now, you might say that is a budget group, of course they are going to complain about spending. Fair enough. So listen to the free market side. Ryan Young at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is about as pro business and anti big government as it gets, said the plan is unlikely to happen even if Republicans win. He said it would add more than a trillion dollars to the debt, and he warned it could push up inflation and interest rates.
When the budget hawks and the free market people say the same thing, that is worth paying attention to.
The Tariff Money.
So where is the money supposed to come from? The President's answer has been tariffs. He has said that because of tariffs, the country is taking in hundreds of billions of dollars of profits.
Let's look at what tariffs actually brought in.
In fiscal year twenty twenty five, the government took in about one hundred and ninety five billion dollars in net customs revenue. That is real money. But compare it to the bill. One hundred and ninety five billion against one point two five trillion. On last year's numbers, a full year of tariff money covers about a sixth of one round of checks. The Tax Foundation puts it closer to a tenth.
And this year there is even less tariff money, because of what happened in February.
What The Forecasts Said A Year Ago.
It is worth remembering what the experts expected before the court ruling.
Last fall, when the two thousand dollar idea was on the table, the Tax Foundation projected about two hundred and sixteen billion dollars in net tariff revenue for this fiscal year. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget was projecting around three hundred billion dollars a year starting in twenty twenty six. Even on those rosier numbers, the Committee said the math did not work. If every dollar of tariff money went out as rebates, the national debt would climb to one hundred and twenty seven percent of the economy by twenty thirty five, instead of one hundred and twenty percent. Make the two thousand dollar checks an every year thing, and it climbs to one hundred and thirty four percent.
That was for two thousand dollars, when the tariff money looked bigger than it does today. The promise now is two and a half times that amount.
What The Supreme Court Did.
In February of twenty twenty six, the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs the President had put in place under an emergency powers law. Those emergency tariffs had been bringing in roughly half of all customs money collected through twenty twenty five.
And when a court says a tax was collected illegally, the government has to give it back.
Roughly one hundred and sixty five billion dollars was collected under those tariffs before the ruling. The refunds started rolling out this spring. In May, the government paid back about twenty two billion dollars. In June, it paid back about forty nine billion. In June, the refunds were bigger than everything the government collected in tariffs that month. Net tariff revenue for June came in at negative twenty five and a half billion dollars. That had never happened before in American history. The government paid out more in tariff refunds than it collected in tariffs.
And the refunds are not finished. Less than half of the illegally collected money had been paid back by that point. There is more going out.
The administration has put new tariffs in place under other laws since then. There was a temporary ten percent tariff on most imports. There are duties of ten to twelve and a half percent on goods from eighty six countries. A fifty percent tariff on certain Canadian goods. Every one of those is already being fought in court or likely will be.
So the tariff money the five thousand dollar check was supposed to come out of is smaller than it was a year ago, it was running negative this summer, and what is left is tied up in lawsuits.
Then Where Does It Come From.
If tariffs cannot pay for it, there are only three other places the money can come from.
One. Cut spending somewhere else by more than a trillion dollars. Nobody has proposed that, and nobody in either party is going to.
Two. Raise taxes. That would be the strangest campaign promise in history. Here is five thousand dollars, and here is the tax hike to pay for it.
Three. Borrow it. Add it to the national debt and pay interest on it for decades.
That third one is the only realistic option, and that is how almost every big government check in recent memory has been paid for. The money gets borrowed and lands in people's bank accounts. People spend it, but the stores do not suddenly have more goods to sell. When there is more money to spend and the same amount to buy, prices go up.
That is not a theory. We just lived through it. And that is where we are headed next.
The Case For It.
Now let me give you the other side, the way the people who back this plan make it.
The Vice President's argument is that this is a dividend for workers. American workers and American families carried the cost of the trade fight, the reasoning goes, so when the tariffs bring money in, some of it should go back to the people who paid for it at the register. That is a fair point as far as it goes. Tariffs do show up in prices.
Treasury Secretary Bessent has made a second argument. He has said the tax law Republicans passed last year is already another payment to the American people, through lower taxes, and that more relief is in discussion. And the White House says growth will bring in the revenue.
Those are the arguments. The trouble is that none of them answers the question of where one point two trillion dollars comes from next year. Growth that might show up someday does not pay a bill that comes due all at once.
Where That Leaves Us.
Here is where the money stands. The tariff money is smaller than it was a year ago, part of it is being handed back by court order, and the rest is in court. Nobody in Washington is offering to cut a trillion dollars. So if this check goes out, the most likely way to pay for it is borrowing.
Washington has done that before. Five years ago it borrowed money and mailed checks to almost every adult in America. What happened next is where we are going now.
The Last Time Washington Mailed Out Money.
To understand what a check like this could do, you have to go back to the last time Washington did it on a big scale. And to be fair about it, you have to start in twenty twenty, because the first round of checks came under this President.
In March of twenty twenty, with the country shut down by COVID, Congress passed the CARES Act and President Trump signed it. Most adults got twelve hundred dollars. In December of twenty twenty, there was another six hundred. Those checks went out while businesses were closed by government order and millions of people could not go to work. Whatever you think of them, they were replacing paychecks that had disappeared.
Then came twenty twenty one, and that was a different story.
The Rescue Plan.
In March of twenty twenty one, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan. One point nine trillion dollars, close to two trillion, passed with Democrat votes only.
By then, vaccines were rolling out. States were reopening. People were going back to work. The economy was already climbing out of the hole. And Washington poured almost two trillion more dollars into it anyway.
The biggest piece most people remember is the fourteen hundred dollar checks. More than two hundred and forty two billion dollars went out in the first six days alone, with billions more over the next month. Married couples making up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars got the full amount. More than ninety four billion dollars went to households that earned more than the national median income. Those were not people who were struggling to put food on the table. They got the check anyway.
Altogether, the fourteen hundred dollar checks cost around four hundred billion dollars. Now hold that up against the five thousand dollar promise. One point two five trillion dollars is about three times what those checks cost.
The Union Pensions.
There was something else buried in that bill that most people never heard about.
Inside the American Rescue Plan was a section called the Butch Lewis Act. It was a bailout for union pension funds. These were multiemployer pension plans, mostly union plans, that had been badly underfunded for years. Some of them were headed for collapse.
Washington stepped in and covered them. By August of twenty twenty four, about sixty seven point seven billion dollars had been approved for eighty nine plans, covering more than one point one million workers, retirees and their families. The projection is that it will run to about seventy nine point six billion dollars across one hundred and ninety eight plans by the time it is done. The single biggest one was the Central States Teamsters fund, which got about thirty six billion dollars on its own.
Now, the people who were going to lose their pensions had worked for them. But the people who ran those funds into the ground did not pay for it. The taxpayers did. Every American paid to fix pension plans that most of them never belonged to, run by unions that have backed Democrats election after election.
Nine Point One.
In June of twenty twenty two, inflation hit nine point one percent. That was the highest rate in more than forty years, the highest since November of nineteen eighty one.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates faster than at any time in forty years. Mortgage rates that had been around three percent went to around seven percent. Car loans went up. Credit card rates went up. A family that could afford a house in twenty twenty one could not afford the same house two years later, even if the price had not changed, because the monthly payment had.
What It Did To Your Wallet.
Inflation is one of those words that gets thrown around until it stops meaning anything, so let me put it plainly.
Nine point one percent is a one year number. The price increases added up year after year. Over the four years of the last administration, prices across the board rose by roughly twenty percent. That means something that cost one hundred dollars in January of twenty twenty one cost about one hundred and twenty dollars four years later. Groceries, rent, insurance, a tank of gas. And for a lot of that stretch, paychecks did not keep up. People got raises and still fell behind, because prices were rising faster than their pay.
And one thing never comes back. When inflation cools off, prices do not go back down. They just stop going up as fast. The twenty dollars on every hundred stays. Families are still paying it right now, today, every time they check out at the store.
That is what a giveaway costs when it is paid for with borrowed money. The check shows up once. The higher prices stay for good.
How Much Came From The Checks.
Now, was all that inflation caused by the Rescue Plan? No. There was a supply chain mess coming out of COVID. There was the war in Ukraine driving up energy prices. Other countries had high inflation too. The Biden administration pointed to Britain, which hit nine point nine percent, and to Europe, which hit nine point one. That is the argument the other side will make, and it is fair to say it.
But here is what the economists found when they looked at it.
A team of economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco compared American inflation to other wealthy countries. Same pandemic, same supply chains, same energy shock. America's inflation ran hotter. Their estimate was that the government's spending added about three percentage points to inflation, roughly four out of every ten points of the inflation Americans lived through. A Johns Hopkins economist, Francesco Bianchi, put it even higher, at about four points. Economists at the International Monetary Fund and Johns Hopkins came up with a similar number to the San Francisco team.
There was one lower estimate. A different group at the San Francisco Fed, back in October of twenty twenty one, said the effect would be small, about a third of a point. That was before the worst of the inflation hit. Depending on who you ask, the number runs from a third of a point to four points. Most of the serious work since then lands near the top of that range.
And there were people who warned about it before it happened. Larry Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said in early twenty twenty one that the Rescue Plan was far bigger than the economy needed. He was right.
The Same Mistake, Bigger.
So here is what I want you to think about.
In twenty twenty one, Washington borrowed money and mailed fourteen hundred dollar checks into an economy that was already recovering. Prices shot up, interest rates followed, and families spent the next three years paying for it.
Now the promise is five thousand dollars per adult, into an economy that is not shut down. Paid for, most likely, with borrowed money, because the tariff money is not there.
Five thousand dollars sounds great. But if the check goes out and prices jump the way they did in twenty twenty two, it does not stay five thousand dollars for very long. Higher prices at the grocery store, the gas pump, the electric bill and the mortgage payment take it right back. That is what happens when you just give money away. We did it once already. We know how it ends.
This Is Not The First Promise.
Before there was a five thousand dollar check, there was a two thousand dollar check.
Last year the President talked about paying Americans back out of tariff money several times, starting in the summer of twenty twenty five. On November ninth, he put it in writing on Truth Social. A dividend of at least two thousand dollars a person, not including high income people, will be paid to everyone. The next day in the Oval Office, he said it would go to middle income and lower income people. A week after that, on November seventeenth, reporters asked him when. His answer was, probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that.
The middle of next year was this summer. It came and went. No two thousand dollar check went out.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked about it at the time, and he was honest about the problem. He said the administration needs legislation to send a dividend, and then he said, we will see. He also floated the idea that it might not be a check at all, but some kind of tax rebate.
So follow the path. Last fall it was two thousand dollars for middle and lower income people, coming by the middle of this year. That did not happen. Now it is five thousand dollars for every adult, coming if Republicans win in November. The number went up, the group of people getting it got bigger, and the date got pushed past an election.
There is already a tariff rebate bill sitting in the Senate. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced it. It is called the American Worker Rebate Act. It has been sitting in the Finance Committee with no cosponsors and no action. Not one other senator has signed on to it.
And when Republicans passed the big tax and spending law in twenty twenty five, with control of the House, the Senate and the White House, they did not put a tariff dividend in it. They had the chance. It was not there.
Bringing It Back Around.
Here is everything in one place.
The President is offering five thousand dollars to every adult citizen if Republicans win both the House and the Senate. There is a path through Congress with fifty one votes. The ninety dollar Medicare payment and the five hundred dollar insurance refund are real and going out this month.
But one round costs more than a trillion dollars. Tariffs bring in a fraction of that, the Supreme Court sent a big piece back, and this summer tariff revenue went negative for the first time ever. That leaves borrowing, and we know what borrowing and mailing out checks did last time. Nine point one percent inflation, seven percent mortgages, and a union pension bailout the taxpayers are still covering. And the last dividend he promised, two thousand dollars by this summer, never came.
So here is where I land. I would love five thousand dollars. But a promise and a check are two different things. Saying you will bring down prices and bringing down prices are two different things. Saying you will put money in people's pockets and putting money in people's pockets are two different things.
And if Congress never passes it, the President gets to say, I offered you five thousand dollars and they stopped it. The blame lands on somebody else.
I support this President. He has gotten a lot right. But I do not believe this check is coming. And if it does come, borrowed, I believe we all pay it back at the store, at the pump and on the mortgage, with interest.
That's Everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
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