{"id":434677,"date":"2026-09-13T11:28:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T11:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/434677\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T11:28:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T11:28:28","slug":"trump-bucks-are-an-economic-and-democratic-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/434677\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump bucks are an economic and democratic disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump\u2019s offer at his midterm convention this week sounded suspiciously like vote-buying, and we hope most Americans were offended by it. A promise to send every adult citizen a $5,000 check<\/a> if Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress in the November elections is as antidemocratic as it gets.<\/p>\n

Maybe he was just trying to be a good guest, adhering to the old idea of \u201cwhen in Rome, do as the Romans do.\u201d Texas\u2019 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa<\/a>\u00a0had proposed sending $1,500 checks to Texas families if she is elected. We wouldn\u2019t have expected the two to have much in common, but Trump actually upped the ante.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a bad idea when Hinojosa proposed it, and it only gets worse when expanded to the entire country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For one thing, it\u2019s a disastrously expensive proposal<\/a>. The country\u2019s population of adult citizens is approximately 248 million. Multiply that by $5,000, and the result is about $1.2 trillion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The payments were not linked to any larger policy goal beyond maintaining the GOP\u2019s hold on the House and Senate. There is no way to pay for them. The new tariffs Trump announced last year would have produced on the order of $1.3 trillion by the end of his term, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated. But those tariffs, like others he has tried to impose since, have been modified by federal courts and will generate less revenue than he suggested. And the tariffs are a terrible idea in any event, amounting to a consumer tax and interrupting crucial trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The more likely outcome is that his payments will raise our annual national deficit, which is projected to reach $2 trillion by the end of the year, by about 50% and add to the country\u2019s $40 trillion national debt.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump bucks\u201d are economically unwise for another reason: shoveling that much money into the economy at once will drive up inflation, which we\u2019ve been suffering since the government started sending out checks in a pandemic spendathon. Isn\u2019t $6-per-gallon diesel pricey<\/a> enough? (The AAA reports that a gallon of diesel cost $3.71 this time last year.)<\/p>\n

Worst of all, though, is the odor of corruption. Democracy is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas competing for the votes of citizens. Cash payments for the preferred electoral outcome are how dictators stay in power while trying to maintain a facade of democracy.<\/p>\n

Robert Mugabe, longtime strongman of Zimbabwe, printed money to ensure his party kept control of the country and to finance the nation\u2019s deficits. (Zimbabwe plunged into hyperinflation that reached 500 billion percent in 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund.) Handing out \u201cgifts\u201d also has been a popular tactic for winning elections in Latin America. It long existed in this country in the form of \u201cwalking around money\u201d or booze.<\/p>\n

But vote-buying is illegal now. If Republican policies are popular and effective, surely that should be enough to sweep the midterms. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump\u2019s offer at his midterm convention this week sounded suspiciously like vote-buying, and we hope most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-434677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}