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5,000 for every American citizen? Might sound farfetched, but the president just proposed it https://apnews.com/article/trump-dividend-5k-5000-check-republicans-cc80644e3168acd31c892129fb849436
First of all this is obviously retarded, there's no ability to mince words here, it would be about 1.3 trillion dollars almost doubling the annual federal deficit, causing massive inflation, and generally fucking the economy. Second of all, it's obviously not happening just like the DOGE dividend and tariff dividends and all the other free money constantly promised. We all know it, there's no need to pretend that this isn't just constant lying.
Rather I'm more interested in what this suggests, here's some thoughts.
Trump is really worried about the midterms to the point he's trying to outright suggest bribing voters. This concern makes sense given the Dems have a 50% chance of a complete sweep. Trump arrived, disappointed Americans, and his legacy is already ending.
As I spoke earlier about the plan to pay parents to stay at home, it's another highlight of how modern "conservativism" just doesn't give a shit about money anymore. The entire concept of fiscal responsibility is just a joke now. If we take the president seriously (which I would hope we could given the prestige of the office but obviously we can not), it's one of the most destructive singular policies someone could possibly suggest.
Likewise, there's not even an attempt to hide the corruption anymore. I can not even imagine how much more blatant he could get that this is attempted bribery. People can play the whataboutism game of former admins if they want, but at least those had the shame to hide it behind closed doors a bit.
The magical tariffs continue to do everything. Trump has promised so much with tariff revenue (a number I can't even cite him on since like many of his claims, it fluctuates widely). CATO has an excellent list of everything they're claimed to fund. It's not just fiscal responsibility that is a joke, the entire idea of government funding has become one.
And this isn't occuring in isolation, it's another sign of the GOP transformation into a populism powered welfare socialist party. Fiscal responsibility is a joke, redistribution from the rich to the poor in bribes is based, trade is evil and companies should be owned by the government.
And what political coalition now exists to point out the obvious and say this isn't smart? The stereotypical conservative response before was "how will we pay for that?" in regards to big sending. The response now is crickets. Negative polarization has gone so far that the DSA, a group that literally calls themselves socialist are now the most free trade voting bloc, so will we reverse polarize ourselves into a small government balanced budget "socialist" president at some point?
But most importantly, what does this say about politics now where promising $1.35 trillion in direct payments to voters is presented as the conservative campaign message. How much further into the slop can we possibly descend, and how we can ever pull ourselves out of it? Maybe the Dems can just promise 5,001 dollars or something.
In a democracy, the guy promising to do the responsible thing will always lose to the guy promising more gibs (whether the gibs comes in the form of lower taxes or increased spending is immaterial as long as there is a deficit). This has been known since ancient Rome. Solving this is a coup-complete problem. Until that day comes, all we can do is agitate for our gibs, and try to deny gibs to our enemies.
Or, as Alexander Fraser Tytler put it:
I seem to recall this being deToqueville but maybe they just made similar points.
Amazingly, this is misattributed to both. And apocryphal in more ways than one.
The main sentence ("A democracy...largesse out of the public treasury") first shows up in print in 1948 (or 1951) in an op-ed by Elmer T. Peterson in the Daily Oklahoman, who just claimed "a somewhat obscure Scotsman named Tytler made this profound observation." with no known evidence.
The second paragraph ("From bondage to spiritual faith...") comes from a 1943 speech by Henning W. Prentiss Jr., then president of Armstrong Cork Company and started out as a piece about industrial management, not democracy.
The two halves were not joined together until the 1970s and the combined version went viral around the 2000 election recount.
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This wasn't a problem for the vast majority of America's history. It's been an issue in modern times. The Left was fine up until either FDR or Great Society. The Right was fine until Trump.
FDR was elected in 1932. Trump was elected in 2016. That is an 84-year gap, during which Democrats accrued massive political capital via the public purse, and Republicans expended vast amounts of political capital trying (and failing) to restrain them.
What was the point of that effort? Why should it be continued? Obviously the democrats have not and will not agree that there is any need for restraint, and obviously a large portion of America sees nothing wrong with this attitude. Are they mistaken? If so, can you persuade them of this fact to a degree that will result in them changing their behavior?
Shit, where's the modern monetary theorists up ins? Aren't we due for a lecture about how the deficit isn't actually a problem, how the National budget isn't actually like a household budget, how debt isn't real?
The Republican party also gained quite a lot of political capital from their stances during this time. They were even able to effectively box Bill Clinton in and get him to balance the budget somewhat. These were popular measures that helped win Republicans elections, since there were enough voters who valued these things relative to other priorities to make it so.
Again, the idea that balanced budgets are political poison akin to cooperating in a defector's game is an overwhelmingly modern phenomenon based on how the electorate moved. The problem is the modern electorate.
The Republican party gained a lot of political capital through those stances... and then failed to fix the issue in any meaningful way, and then Bush blew the budget out on ruinous foreign wars, and Obama blew the budget out in the usual progressive ways, and now the stance itself is no longer credible. 2nd-term Obama was the point at which I personally committed to never caring about the issue again; fiscal responsibility sounds good, but you just straight-up cannot get there from here, and scarce political capital needs to be allocated where it might plausibly do some good.
How did the modern electorate get to be the modern electorate? Did 85 years of massive redistribution have anything to do with it?
The median voter's commitment to deficit reduction was indeed waning by the 90s, so the achievements of Clinton and Paul Ryan were short-lived. It was still alive to some extent which is how they were possible in the first place, but this was no longer the 70s or even the 80s.
Simple: The primary problem is that voters in both parties really, really love shovelling money to the Olds. The issue is Social Security and Medicare. D's like giving money to the poor, which disproportionately goes to Blacks, but that's not the primary issue. It's the voters worshiping SS + Medicare.
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How has the electorate changed to make this the case?
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An interesting thought experiment. What if, after 1932, the Republican party was socially conservative but fiscally liberal. It might be that we are at the same position as our current timeline vis-a-vis the debt, but with much lower crime, multiculturalism, and degeneracy.
Assuming that spending is constrained by external factors, it doesn't make sense for one party to restrain spending so their enemies can spend twice as much.
Reminds me of the "good" kings throughout history who handed a giant treasury surplus to their successors only to have their successors blow it on extravagance and foreign wars. Today we remember Henry VIII, the spender and warmonger, not Henry VII, the prudent saver.
Although I'll note that Henry VIII's wars are one of the least remembered things about him, compared to his personal life, religious policy, or even diplomacy (Field of the Cloth of Gold). All that money culminated in... burning down Edinburgh, occupying Boulogne for six years, and selling that town back to the French. Almost as much of a waste of money as the Great Society.
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