President Donald Trump is adamant that a dubious dividend check scheme paid for with revenue from his tariff regime should become a reality, the White House said Wednesday.
Earlier this week, the president floated the idea that Americans could receive “at least $2000 a person” from the federal government paid for with the proceeds from his wide-ranging tariffs on imports from across the globe. “[H]igh income people” would be excluded from the program, he wrote on Truth Social, and any excess funds would be used to pay down the nation’s $37 trillion deficit.
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Asked about the plan at a briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed Trump’s enthusiasm about the dividend checks. “The president made it clear he wants to make it happen,” she told reporters. “So his team of economic advisers are looking into it.”
The president’s Monday morning social media post appeared to take administration officials by surprise, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying the $2,000 dividend could come in “a lot of forms,” hinting that the funds might take the shape of tax cuts, not cold hard cash.
Bessent told ABC News Wednesday that the plans are still “in discussion,” and that there are “a lot of options here that the president is talking about,” including limiting the rebate to families making less than $100,000 per year.
However, some experts are skeptical that the dollars and cents make sense, even with parameters on income.
“Secretary Bessent suggests the tariff dividend income cutoff would be $100,000. That will cost at least $300 billion. Tariffs are projected to generate about $217 billion a year,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at nonpartisan non-profit the Tax Foundation, wrote on X.
According to York, 150 million adults in the U.S. would qualify for the rebate at the $100,000 cap. To date, the tariffs have raised about $120 billion.
Pointing to data from the Joint Committee on Taxation, Customs and Border Protection and the Internal Revenue Service, the tax policy expert wrote, “The math gets worse accounting for the full budgetary impact of tariffs: a dollar of tariff revenue offsets about 24 cents of income and payroll tax revenue.”
“Adjusting for that, tariffs have raised $90 billion of net revenues compared to Trump’s proposed $300 billion rebate,” she added.
Yale Budget Lab analyst John Ricco told the Associated Press that he estimates Trump’s duties will fetch between $200 billion and $300 billion each year, but paying out $2,000 to all Americans, including children, would cost the federal government double that amount. “It’s clear that the revenue coming in would not be adequate,” he told the outlet, noting that the Commander in Chief would also require legislation from Congress to dole out the dividends.
