Life Moves Pretty Fast. Fiscal Reality Doesn’t.
The administration that can’t deliver basic benefits now says tariffs made America rich enough to hand everyone $2,000. Anyone buying that?
Hours after writing this, there was talk that the Senate reached a deal on voting to reopen the government.
Let’s pause for a reality check. This is the same administration currently fighting a court ruling to pay November SNAP benefits in full, refusing to hire enough air traffic controllers to keep airports from melting down—and now we’re supposed to believe they’ve suddenly discovered enough spare cash to hand every American $2,000? Sure. And next week, Ferris Bueller’s going to balance the federal budget between classes.
ABC News reports that convicted felon President Trump now insists the country is “the richest, most respected in the world” thanks to his tariffs, and that a dividend of at least $2,000 per person (excluding “high-income people”) is on the way. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week that the dividend “could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways… it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda—no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans.” Then, in a masterclass of confidence-building, he admitted he hadn’t actually spoken with the president about it. Translation: no plan, no math, no clue—just a headline and a hopeful social media post.
This isn’t just irresponsible. It’s absurd. This is an administration that struggles with the basics of governance—the kind of outfit that can’t find the money to feed people but can apparently conjure trillions from tariffs. It’s like watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off try to teach civics to the executive branch: nobody studied, nobody listened, and the principal’s still wandering around the halls yelling, “Bueller? Bueller?”
History, by the way, already graded this homework. In 1930, Congress passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act in the middle of the Great Depression, hoping to raise revenue. Anyone remember what happened? It didn’t work—the economy tanked even further. And now, nearly a century later, we’re being told that tariffs equal free money. Even George H. W. Bush, hardly an economist, dismissed this kind of supply-side sorcery as “voodoo economics.” ABC News notes that Bessent himself couldn’t provide a single concrete mechanism for distributing the $2,000 dividend. So we’re being asked to believe that trillions of dollars are magically materializing while the government can’t manage food assistance or airport staffing.
Here’s the truth: if the administration can’t handle small, tangible things—like making sure families can eat or flights can land safely—there’s no universe in which they’re delivering $2,000 to everyone. The “tariff dividend” isn’t a policy; it’s performance art. And like most of this administration’s theater, it ends with someone else picking up the tab.
Ferris was right: life moves pretty fast. But fiscal reality doesn’t. And if the people in charge don’t stop and learn something—anything—the rest of us will keep paying the price for their day off.