President Donald Trump has revised his proposal to send $2,000 checks to low- and middle-income Americans using tariff revenue to ease affordability costs.
What did Trump say about his proposed tariff checks?
“A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform, according to The Hill.
In April, he signed an executive order to investigate the national security risks posed by reliance on imported goods, according to a White House notice. Since then, Trump has imposed hefty tariffs on specific countries, straining U.S. trade policy.
At the same time, his administration faces a looming Supreme Court case that could change his controversial trade policy. But despite the optimism, other experts and members of his own party remain skeptical.
What are officials and critics saying about the idea?
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said the proposal would first have to pass Congress, and he criticized how the Biden administration handled inflation.
“But there’s still room to go, and so we are making up ground fast. The fact is, the people are still down about $2,000 relatively to what their purchasing power was when Joe Biden took office,” Hassett said during his Monday appearance on Fox News, according to The Hill.
“And so we understand that the people feel like there is an affordability problem, but we are closing the gap fast, and with these policies and potentially rebate checks, we might close the whole gap really, really fast,” Hassett added.
The public has voiced its opinion on Trump and his tariff policies since his return to office. Even in recent state elections, affordability was a top concern for many voters.
“Mr. Trump is trying to dull the public’s tariff pain with direct payments that he can take credit for. This is a new version of the age-old income redistribution game of taxing people too much but then trying to appease them with tax credits or one-time cash payments,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote Sunday in a piece criticizing Trump’s back-and-forth ideas on tariffs.
How would Americans receive the $2,000 dividend funds?
While Trump has only revealed this information through Truth Social posts, he confirmed Monday that low- and middle-income Americans would receive the $2,000 checks and that he would use the rest of the tariff revenue to pay down the national debt, which stands at over $38 trillion, per The Hill. He has not revealed how Americans would receive the funds.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Sunday interview on ABC’s This Week that he has not spoken with Trump about the idea, and that the dividend could manifest “in lots of forms and lots of ways,” including funding tax cuts signed into law earlier this year.
According to Al Jazeera, the administration had already promised to use the tariff revenue for other purposes, such as offsetting the country’s deficit and the cost of the GOP tax bill signed back in July.
Over the past few months, both Trump and Bessent have announced how the new tariff policy could help pay off the national debt. However, the controversial policy has instead cost Americans between $1,600 and $2,600 per household per year, according to independent estimates, per Al Jazeera.