“If tariff dividends are paid annually, deficits would increase by $6 trillion over ten years,” per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
President Trump’s recent proposal to pay Americans “at least $2,000 a person” from new tariff revenue—a policy he calls “tariff dividends”—is facing sharp criticism from a budget watchdog, who calculates that the plan will actually lose twice as much money for the country as the tariffs are generating.
Writing in a weekend post on Truth Social, Trump argued that tariff revenues could be redistributed directly to individuals in the form of annual payments, with “high income people” excluded from the payouts. The idea, pitched as a way both to reward taxpayers and possibly reduce the national debt, bears a strong resemblance to the structure of the COVID-era Economic Impact Payments, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).
But the numbers reveal a steep fiscal challenge. The CRFB estimates that distributing just a single round of $2,000 payments to Americans—calculated to match the COVID payments, which included both adults and children—would cost the federal government around $600 billion per year.
