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.
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. By contrast, the tariffs that Trump has championed have raised about $100 billion to date and, even accounting for pending legal cases, are only projected to raise about $300 billion annually going forward.
