If the White House handing out $2,000 checks to all U.S. citizens sounded too good to be true, it just might be. At least, that\u2019s now the sentiment among bettors.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, President Trump made an official promise of a \u201cdividend\u201d payable<\/a> to all Americans. Posting on Truth Social<\/a>, the social media platform he owns, the president wrote that tariff opponents were \u201cfools\u201d and added: \u201crecord investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place.\u201d He added: \u201cA dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n Since then, excitement around the project has dimmed. According to speculators betting on the odds market site Kalshi<\/a>, there\u2019s now just a 2% chance that Americans will receive such a check anytime soon. These odds have dropped considerably from the week following Trump\u2019s announcement, when the market priced a more than 13% likelihood of the rebates being paid out.<\/p>\n Indeed, the odds tracker isn\u2019t even assuming the promise of a $2,000 check\u2014it\u2019s based on the odds of a million Americans being given notice of an $1,000 check, and the verified details being reported (not the payouts completed) by January 1.<\/p>\n Over at Polymarket, the crypto-based probability trading platform, the odds of Americans receiving a check<\/a> before December 31 have fallen to just 1%, down from 50% on November 15. <\/p>\n In the days since President Trump made the pledge, members of his cabinet have poured cold water on the plans. On\u00a0ABC\u2019s\u00a0This Week with George Stephanopoulos\u00a0on Novmber 9<\/a>, shortly after the post from Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted he hadn\u2019t yet talked to the president about the dividend plan, adding it would require Congress to pass legislation.<\/p>\n Bessent also attempted to unpick the form the tariff stimulus would take, perhaps not a check but in relief already signed into law: \u201cThe $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms \u2026 it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president\u2019s agenda. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. Those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill.\u201d <\/p>\n Doing the math<\/p>\n Bessent\u2019s caution may be justified, as the president has also stated that some tariff revenue will also go toward paying down America\u2019s \u201cenormous\u201d $38 trillion national debt burden. While tariffs are bringing in a significant sum\u2014approximately $30 billion a month<\/a> by September 2025\u2014that revenue is minor compared even to the interest the U.S. government is paying to service its debt.<\/p>\n Treasury data<\/a> shows the interest paid on national debt for FY2025 is $1.22 trillion, and rising every year. Even if President Trump\u2019s tariff collection continues to rake in $30 billion a month and $360 billion a year, this still amounts to a little over a third of the interest payments on the debt\u2014it doesn\u2019t touch the debt itself.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s $2,000 plan is also eye-wateringly costly. Even if the government were to pay each household\u2014as opposed to each individual\u2014in the bottom 50% of earners, that would still require payouts to more than 67.5 million homes, per data from the St Louis Fed<\/a>. That would imply that $135 billion, nearly half of the tariff revenues, would immediately be paid out to citizens instead of being directed toward national debt.<\/p>\n Yet despite further caveats from Bessent in the past few days, Trump doubled down on the plan<\/a> yesterday. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to \u2026 probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that,\u201d Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, according to\u00a0Axios<\/a>. The payments, he said, would go to \u201cindividuals of moderate income, middle income.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the White House handing out $2,000 checks to all U.S. citizens sounded too good to be true,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":387716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[69,40634,50,18244,2175,4053,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-387715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"category-us","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-national-debt","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-scott-bessent","13":"tag-tariffs","14":"tag-tariffs-and-trade","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115571133395462901","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}