Axios reports that:

President Trump on Monday promised the government would pay out $2,000 tariff dividend checks starting around mid-2026.

This is a horrible idea, and Congress should flatly refuse to acquiesce. All else aside, Washington D.C. needs to get out of this habit. Absent truly extraordinary circumstances, the federal government should not be sending checks out to the citizenry as if it were some ersatz Publishers Clearing House. As of today, the Treasury is 38.2 trillion dollars in debt. If, by some miracle, it has found a pool of money that has not been allocated to anything specific, it ought to use that money to cut the deficit or pay down the debt. If it does not have such a pool, it ought not to be handing it out. Doing so is bad for our system of limited government, destructive of the independence of the citizenry, and irresponsible toward future generations. Axios notes that “a tariff dividend in the middle of 2026 would mean the government would be putting a huge check in most voters’ pockets on the eve of crucial midterm elections.” But this, of course, is exactly the problem. We do not pay taxes — or incur debt in our children’s names — so that the party in power can bribe voters to keep it in office.

Trump is calling the idea a “tariff dividend.” But this, too, makes little sense, given that he is simultaneously insisting that the tariff revenues are being used to pay down the debt. Apparently, there is nothing that these tariffs can’t do! They both are, and are not, a fundraising mechanism; they both are, and are not, being paid by foreigners, rather than Americans; they both are, and are not, a permanent solution that will help us restore manufacturing in the heartland. The public is already wildly misinformed about who pays taxes in the United States, about where most federal spending goes, and about how easy it would be to fix our entitlements crisis. The distribution of $2,000 checks — of dubious origin, and with amorphous justification — would only make this ignorance worse.

And then there’s the problem of the Supreme Court, which might well rule that the president never had the authority to impose his tariffs in the first instance. One of the most cynical and destructive things that Joe Biden did while in office was to promise half a trillion dollars’ worth of student loan “forgiveness” that he had no power to deliver, and then to blame the Supreme Court when, doing its sacred duty, it forbade him from executing his plan. By vowing to send out $2,000 to tens of millions of households, Donald Trump is flirting with the same pernicious course.

Axios concludes with the suggestion that “the administration is aggressively fighting a growing affordability crisis, arguing that it has inflation under control and will bring prices down next year.” That is good news (although its claim about inflation is debatable), and a worthwhile aim. But it cannot be achieved by sending out cash handouts or with gimmicks such as fifty-year mortgages. Bringing prices down is a supply-side issue, not a demand-side issue. America needs lower tariffs, lower taxes, fewer regulations, more new homes, and more competition — not yet another subsidy for those doing the buying, paid for by a government intervention that should never have been made in the first instance.