Trump’s Magically Disappearing Stimulus Checks
I was promised cheaper groceries and tariff rebates and all I got was this lousy pogrom.
CHECK OUT THE NUMBERS: Hiring has slowed significantly. In fact, we had less job growth all of last year than we had in an average month during the Biden administration. Inflation is still too hot. Health insurance costs have spiked. And it turns out that, despite President Donald Trump’s promises that foreign companies would be paying for his tariffs, in fact it’s U.S. consumers who are paying 95 percent of the domestic cost, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
No surprise, then, that Americans are big mad about the economy. So mad, in fact, that they miss Joe Biden’s economy, which as you may recall they very much despised.
The Trump administration has a two-part strategy for allaying these concerns:
Deny there’s a problem
Promise stimulus checks that never come
Previous editions of Receipts have covered #1, including Trump’s habit of calling affordability concerns a “hoax.” So let’s home in on #2, particularly since the president reiterated in his NBC News interview last week that he would send out $2,000 checks. “I’m the only one can do it,” he said, “because I’m takin’ in hundreds of billions of dollars of money from tariffs.” But the real record of his promises over the past year suggests otherwise.