U.S. President Donald Trump's aides are giving conflicting accounts of how the government would pay for the $5,000-per-person "dividend" he pledged ahead of the midterm elections.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview a day earlier that the money could be raised "without relying on the deficit or taxpayer money," pointing to the "Trump Platinum Card" as a source, according to NBC News and other outlets on the 12th. Under the program, foreign nationals who pay $5 million each can stay in the United States for up to 270 days a year without paying U.S. taxes on income earned outside the country. Lutnick said more than 100,000 people are on a waiting list to come to the United States, and that the program could secure $500 billion.
That differs from the explanation offered by Vice President J.D. Vance, who has presented tariff revenue as the core funding base. In an earlier interview with Fox, Vance defended Trump's pledge as a "dividend for American workers" and said revenue from steep tariffs could be returned to the public.
Both approaches, however, are seen as falling short in scale. Paying $5,000 each to roughly 240 million American adults would require $1.2 trillion by simple arithmetic. Even if the platinum card revenue Lutnick described materialized, it would cover less than half the total cost.
The plan to fund the payouts with tariff revenue is equally unrealistic. Tariff revenue from October of last year through August of this year totaled $167.3 billion, up just 1.2% from the same period a year earlier, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO estimates that the maximum annual tariff revenue attainable over the next 10 years is only $424 billion.
Against that backdrop, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council and often described as Trump's chief economic strategist, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV that Congress could use the budget reconciliation process. Reconciliation allows revenue and spending bills to pass the Senate while bypassing opposition blocking tactics. Critics counter that reconciliation is merely a legislative procedure and not a mechanism that generates funding.
