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Donald Trump on Sunday mused about giving most Americans $2,000 funded by tariff revenues collected by the president’s administration – an evident bid to rally public support on the issue.
“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
The post also made it a point to call people against tariffs “FOOLS!”
For such a plan to take effect, congressional approval would likely be required. Earlier this year, Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced a bill proposing $600 in tariff rebates for nearly all Americans and their dependent children.
“Americans deserve a tax rebate after four years of [Joe] Biden [White House] policies that have devastated families’ savings and livelihoods,” Hawley said at the time. He said the legislation would “allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country”.
However, US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in August that the administration’s main focus remains reducing the national debt, which stands at $38.12tn, using funds from tariff collections. He said the money would be used first to start paying down the federal debt – not to give rebate checks to Americans.
According to the treasury department’s September report, $195bn in customs duties were collected during the first three quarters of the year.
Though, it appears that the cost of giving out $2,000 checks could easily surpass the amount actually collected from the tariffs. According to calculations, these payments would cost close to if not more than double the amount that has reportedly been generated so far.
“If the cutoff is $100,000, 150M adults would qualify, for a cost near $300 billion,” wrote Erica York, vice-president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, on social media. “If kids qualify, that grows.”
“The math gets worse accounting for the full budgetary impact of tariffs”, York added. “Adjusting for that, tariffs have raised $90 billion of net revenues compared to Trump’s proposed $300 billion rebate.”
John Arnold, co-chair of Arnold Ventures, estimated that the dividend payments could cost as much as $513bn.
As of October, consumers were paying an average effective tariff rate of nearly 18%, the highest since 1934, according to data from the Yale Budget Lab. Since the president introduced widespread tariffs on global trading partners in April, companies have passed part of those costs on to consumers.
This isn’t the first time Trump has floated the idea of giving Americans stimulus checks based on revenue from his tariffs. In October, he said that he was considering offering Americans checks from the revenue, worth somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000. In July, the president again suggested that the government might consider tariff rebate checks.
In February, he and tech mogul Elon Musk, who at the time was still advising the White House, said they were considering the idea of a $5,000 “dividend” check based on savings generated by the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge). These payments never came to be as the national deficit actually increased under Doge, and the amount cut from federal spending was significantly exaggerated.
The US supreme court heard arguments on Wednesday on Trump’s sweeping global tariffs and appeared skeptical of their legality.
