Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
While the stock market implodes on or ahead of schedule, as predicted, I had another revelation last night that anyone with a first-grade understanding of math could have also arrived yet. We can’t afford this $5,000 dividend check idea.
I mean, we can’t really afford *anything *as a country right now, but it is arguably the worst moment in history to randomly hand out $5,000 to citizens for no reason.
I would love $5,000. You would love $5,000. I have yet to encounter the American who opens his mailbox, finds a check for five grand from the United States Treasury and screams, “Goddammit, not this again.”
But unfortunately, there is a very small problem with President Trump’s latest proposal to send every adult American a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress in November: we don’t have the fcking mone*y.
Trump unveiled the idea at the Republican convention in Dallas, promising a $5,000 payment to every adult U.S. citizen if Republicans win the House and Senate. With roughly 240 million adult citizens, Reuters estimates the program would cost approximately $1.2 trillion. Trump’s explanation for how we can afford this is essentially that America is now swimming in money. “We’re taking in trillions, trillions of dollars,” he said while discussing the proposal.
And while tariff revenue has increased substantially, it isn’t remotely close to producing the trillions of dollars necessary to fund something like this. The federal government is already spending considerably more than it collects.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal deficit reached roughly $1.8 trillion during the first ten months of fiscal 2026, about $169 billion more than during the same period last year. CBO estimates the full-year deficit will be roughly $2.1 trillion.
Think about what that means. We aren’t discussing what to do with a surplus. There isn’t some giant extra pile of money sitting in Washington. We’re already borrowing roughly $2 trillion a year to cover what the government spends, and now we’re contemplating borrowing another $1.2 trillion so Washington can mail everybody a check.
We’re calling it a “dividend” but that’s not generally how dividends work. If a company loses $2 trillion a year, borrows another $1.2 trillion and then distributes the borrowed money to shareholders, CNBC does not call it an exciting new capital return program. Eventually somebody from the SEC starts asking questions.
Meanwhile, the gross national debt has now blown through $40 trillion. Debt held by the public is roughly $32 trillion and, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest budget outlook, will equal about 101% of GDP this year. CBO projects that it will surpass the post World War II record of 106% of GDP around the end of this decade and reach approximately 120% by 2036.
