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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.
Socialism is just the natural voting choice of a society in which almost all adults are allowed to vote. The thing that really has to be explained is why not all major political parties in mass franchise democracies are socialist. And this can be explained: other factors such as pride, ethnic tensions, pro-capitalism propaganda, etc. can override the desire for socialist redistribution. So can intellectual arguments about how socialism fails, but let's face it, only a tiny minority of the population are familiar with them so they don't really play that much of a role except perhaps when rewritten by capitalism-loving think tanks to appeal to a mass audience.
Another thing that can override the natural popularity of socialism is a widely held notion that the economy is doing well, that a rising tide is lifting all boats. I think we probably had something like that in the 1950s. We don't have that now. I'll leave aside arguments over whether the economy is really doing well or not. The important thing when it comes to the current argument is that large numbers of people are upset with how it's doing.
In recent years in the US, one of the major reasons for the low popularity of socialism has been just the plain off-putting nature of many people who are vocally into socialism, plus the fact that many of them are anti-white racists and/or are into ideas like "defund the police". But it stands to reason that as soon as socialists manage to actually get their act together and stop seeming like insane weirdoes, the popularity of socialism rises. Especially given the progress of AI that increasingly is capable of doing more and more people's jobs.
I don't even think that socialism is a good way to run a pre-AI society in the long term, although I think that it might be the only viable way to run a post-AI society. I'm familiar with and agree with the major arguments against socialism: it stagnates economic and technical progress, eventually leading to worse outcomes across the board including for the working class, and it tends to result in authoritarianism and often mass murder. I'm pretty far from being someone who is sympathetic to socialism.
And even despite all that, I would still happily vote for a socialist or at least a social democrat party IF I could believe that voting for them would result in better economic conditions for me and wouldn't just result in having the local police force defunded. I have my own material prosperity to think about. The possibility that socialism might overall make things worse for the working class 10-20 years down the road compared to if we stayed with a more capitalist model... eh... I don't know, the reality is that I want to ensure my material well being now and try make sure that AI progress doesn't turn my current economic class into a luxury that the rich only have incentive to keep around out of altruism.
Any anti-socialism arguments that are likely to actually work on me would have to appeal to my selfishness. Indeed, socialists themselves would be able to appeal much better to me if they did a better job of appealing to my selfishness.
Trump's socialist-leaning qualities do that for many people (I'll put aside the question of the degree to which his socialism is just a con). It's somewhat socialist-leaning economics without the stereotypical blue haired people, the vegan communes, and the "white people bad". Also without the boring mundane day-in-day-out activities of labor union organizing, which is probably the other main thing that people were identifying with socialist-leaning politics until recently. The "dirtbag left" is another, much more culturally leftist variant, of the same thing. Basically, socialism in the US reached a stage of irrelevance at some point that it actually had to be rescued from the people who were calling themselves socialists. Now that it kind of, to a limited extent, has been, it's understandably on the rise.
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