Trump’s pre-midterm offer to send every American adult $5,000 if the GOP retains the House and Senate has fallen flat with voters, not because it’s a bribe, but because they don’t trust him to deliver.
Midterm Money Meh
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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As required by Left Law … I hereby do aver (or swear) that Donald Trump is a stupid doody head and he’s a jerk and just awful and a stupid. I double-dog promise, I don’t want to marry him.
Okay. Now that the legal requirements are out of the way. … Trump is doing what every politician does: Promising something that almost everyone knows (at some level) he can’t deliver. IIRC, Reagan promised to lower taxes, increase the military budget, and balance the books. This is like you saying that you’ll be taking a pay cut, using your credit cards more, and still, somehow, will have a positive bank balance at the end of it.
For Trump to pay $5,000 to the voters? That’s, what a trillion dollars? And where’s that going to come from? The secret stash of million-dollar bills under his mattress? I think the most interesting part of all this, as Ted points out, is that people are suspicious. Usually they fall for it. “Hillary’s on our side. Biden’s got real momentum. No one wants Sanders’ Socialist Healthcare!” (It does continue my theory that Independence Day was Trump’s last hurrah. The wheels on his carnival wagon seem to be coming off, right on schedule. I suppose the real test with be the shellacking that the Republicans will get in the midterms, followed by how the democrats will get nothing done, despite a majority. If Polymarket offered it, I’d bet everything that the dems will mention “work across the aisle” in their victory speech.
> And where’s that going to come from?
The Republican tax cuts for the upper class came on the backs of the middle class. In this case the $5,000 or a universal basic income could do the reverse; it would come on the backs of the upper class and benefit the rest of us. Okay, so this is Trump and he has no intention of paying the $5,000 much less doing so responsibly, but progressives could actually make a universal basic income into a reality.
The progressives are supposed to say that $5,000 is a nice start on a universal basic income, but we’ll do it better.