Trump Will Never Mail the $5,000 Checks

Donald Trump’s new promise to give a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans win the midterm elections may be an effort to answer a variant of an age-old riddle : Can Trump devise a policy so ill-conceived that even Trump’s intelligence is insulted? Candidates often make inducements part of their campaign pitch.

One obvious peculiarity of this plan is that Trump’s party already controls both chambers of Congress.

Why, then, should the bonus checks be contingent on voters giving Republicans another two-year majority? Trump has told reporters that he could distribute the loot without congressional approval.

This is untrue. (It’s a facially unconstitutional infringement of Congress’s spending authority.) If it were true, however, it would make his decision to hinge the checks on the election’s outcome even more mysterious.

If the choice were his alone, the outcome would seem totally irrelevant.

Under certain economic circumstances, distributing checks to everybody can make sense.

In a deeply depressed economy, in which consumer spending is too low to maintain high employment levels, juicing it with a cash infusion can help keep it alive. [ Jonathan Chait: Does Trump want Republicans to win the midterms? ] However, current circumstances are quite different.

Unemployment is low and growth is healthy.

The problem is that inflation is running well above target levels.

Injecting roughly $1.2 trillion (the one-year cost of the checks) into the economy would likely make inflation worse—more cash would be chasing the same number of goods and services, driving up their price.

This, in turn, would probably force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to tamp down inflation, which would throw recovery into jeopardy.

J.

D.

Vance has suggested that the checks could be paid for with tariff revenue.