Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Images
Economists and budget experts are blasting President Donald Trump’s latest promise to send Americans $2,000 checks funded by tariff revenue as unviable and baseless, per CNBC.
Over the weekend, Trump posted on Truth Social that his administration would soon pay “a dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high-income people!)” using money collected from tariffs on imported goods. He also suggested that any leftover funds would go toward paying down the national debt.
However, experts say such a move is unrealistic. According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. has collected roughly $195 billion in customs duties this year, far short of the hundreds of billions needed to fund checks for the majority of American households. A payment of $2,000 to just 100 million people would cost $200 billion, and expanding that to 200 million Americans would double the cost. A recent estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put the price tag for such a plan as high as $600 billion.
Economists say Trump’s proposal also misrepresents how tariffs function. Tariffs are taxes on imports, paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries. Those companies typically pass on the added costs to consumers through higher prices, meaning Americans already pay for the tariffs indirectly. An October analysis by Yale University’s Budget Lab found that current tariff policies are expected to cost the average U.S. household about $1,800 next year.
“You can’t recycle a tax that’s already been paid by households and call it a dividend,” Brett House, an economics professor at Columbia Business School, said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told ABC News that he has not discussed the idea of tariff rebates with Trump, and there are no formal proposals in the works. Economists also noted that sending out direct payments would require congressional approval, which would likely prove to be a difficult hurdle in a divided government.
Even if such checks were somehow issued, experts warn that they could prompt inflation. Pandemic-era stimulus payments boosted consumer prices by roughly 2.6 percentage points, according to a 2023 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
“Money is money, and when more money comes into the economy to chase the same amount of goods and services, it’s going to be inflationary,” financial analyst Stephen Kates said.
Trump's tariff policies are also currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court. If the court rules against the administration, the government may have to refund billions in tariffs to importers, erasing the very revenue Trump says he’ll return to taxpayers.
“The numbers, the legality, and the economics just don’t line up,” Ed Mills, a Washington policy analyst at Raymond James, said. “This is a political promise, not an economic plan.”
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