At his party’s midterm convention in Texas, President Donald Trump said that, if Republicans retain control of Congress in November, he “will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
That pledge reflects an epic lack of subtlety, even for Trump. It also places him in line with a long history of politicians from both parties who have implicitly and sometimes explicitly tried to buy votes with promises of government largesse. Given Trump’s other recent failed benefit check promises, it also suggests the prudent shouldn’t count on spending this latest proposed windfall anytime soon.
Many will recall that two January 2021 Senate special elections in Georgia turned effectively on the same question: which party controls Congress — and with it, whether voters nationwide would receive thousands of dollars in federal “stimulus checks.” As CNN reported then, “President-elect Joe Biden said electing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in Tuesday’s runoff elections would end the gridlock in Washington and allow a Democrat-controlled Senate to provide $2,000 stimulus checks to Americans.”
With Trump-like directness, Biden said, “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door.” Ossoff and Warnock won and later cast decisive votes for Biden’s March 2021 American Rescue Plan, which showered the country with the promised stimulus checks.
In his current term, Trump has been far less effective at turning similar promises into action. He previously expressed support for would-be $5,000 “DOGE dividends,” which would have nominally reflected a share of savings achieved by the Department of Government Efficiency. He also proposed tariff-rebate checks worth “at least” $2,000 for low- and middle-income individuals — ironically backed by the same revenues he suggests will cover his latest $5,000 dividend plan.
Yet those unfulfilled promises pale in comparison with the mother of all government check-writing plans: then-Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) 2020 COVID-19 pandemic universal basic income proposal, which was released three months before Biden chose her as his running mate. Harris’s legislation never advanced, but if it had, most Americans would have received $2,000 checks each month between March 2020 and August 2023. Up to two parents and three children per household would have been eligible for a maximum of $10,000 per month or an astonishing $120,000 per year, nearly double the U.S. median household income of $68,000 in 2020. Across 42 months, the proposed legislation would have conservatively cost an eye-watering $21 trillion, which assumes a scheme so massive, once started, could ever have been stopped.
That’s just a sample of the “check” portion of Washington’s recent vote-buying agenda, but other benefits-for-votes schemes abound. Biden-era student loan forgiveness plans targeted millions of often-reluctant young voters. In 2010, Obamacare created millions of new adult Medicaid and other health coverage recipients, which then-Vice President Biden called a “big f***ing deal” for obvious reasons.
The 2002 farm bill crafted by the Bush administration expanded food stamp eligibility for noncitizens, in a move designed to appeal to Hispanic voters, whom the White House was “ardently courting.” That legislation led to an eventual doubling of the national food stamp caseload and tripling of the program’s costs.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Congress regularly passed politically popular across-the-board Social Security benefit increases before finally adopting automatic inflation adjustments. It was surely no coincidence that a 1972 law providing a 20% benefit increase took effect two months before that fall’s elections.
Those and other popular benefit expansions, along with trillion-dollar stimulus packages and soaring entitlement spending, all contributed to today’s $40 trillion in federal debt. With annual deficits totaling $2 trillion, including $1 trillion and rising in interest payments alone, that legacy of fiscal incontinence is one of the biggest hurdles to Trump’s fulfilling his latest dividend check promises.
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Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, noted the “fiscally dangerous” proposal would cost $1.2 trillion in a single year. The proposal would require approval by Congress and members of the president’s own party have openly questioned the plan’s merits and enormous price tag.
All of which suggests that the legacy of unaffordable promises politicians have made in the past to secure reelection may finally be catching up with contemporary vote-buying attempts. If so, that’s both ironic and long overdue.
Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute.