Watching the left lose its hive mind over Trump’s $5000.00 midterm convention “election bribe” is not just predictable but hilarious. We have no idea what he means, where it might come from, how it might manifest, or whether he’s serious. A check, a tax rebate or credit, an in-pocket real-world benefit courtesy of the invisible hand. It hardly matters. In existential terms, you will always find more of your money in your pocket with Republican majorities at any level of government than with Democrat, but the Trump thing sounds like it will be someone else’s.
My take on it when I saw it was that he’s doing a parody of the Democrats — who offer free healthcare, free housing, no more bills (the DSA is literally promising that), welfare for everybody. All they do is make bullshit promises of free swag for the folks. So, if I’m Trump, and I think it’s a civilizational mission to keep a gaggle of communists without meaningful work on their resumes from getting power on Capitol Hill and unleashing a level of government dysfunction and foreign intrigue on Washington that might actually be unprecedented, then yeah — I’m going to do and say whatever the hell I need to in order to win.
The only promise a government can make that doesn’t cost someone else some of their property is a tax cut. Everything else costs someone something, so the lesson is that less government will always save you money. The corollary to which is that Democrats always want more money; ergo, less for you, but they hide it behind a lie. Don’t worry, someone else will pay, and we hope you are not curious enough and are greedy enough not to think it through.
The free market isn’t a closed system. Money “invested” in the government can’t do anything but what the government wants it to do. It has to be removed from the person who earned it, taken out of the system that leverages it into mortgages, small business loans, and other projects where private people assume the risk. If they lose, it’s their money; if they win, they make more, and it becomes available for other investments. All of that creates real jobs, innovation, actual progress that the market (you, me, everyone) wants and needs.
The government robs people to take risks no one in government will have to pay for because it’s all backstopped by the government’s ability to steal more from you. They spend it on their priorities at your expense and risk. Failure isn’t just an option; it’s imminent. A large chunk disappears into the bureaucracy before any of it gets near the thing. Some additional portion is lost to waste, abuse, or fraud. Another is spent pretending to police the waste, abuse, and fraud. And if any is left, it typically ends up in the hands of some NGO that can’t make the problem better because the problem is their business model.
Trump, in other words, is playing the Left’s game, but instead of pretending he can get the government to give you something for free that will likely cost taxpayers ten times more, he’s just offering you cash.
It’s the same game without the government job programs required to deliver it. Someone else pays for it, but no one else benefits until you spend it on what matters to you.
Neither of these can work, and neither should be something the government does, unless it means taking 5,000 fewer dollars from you, ideally now, and in every year moving forward. But most people won’t see that as the payday that it is.
They’d rather get a check for 5k, which is why Trump had to say it, so he did.
I’m guessing they’ve calibrated this as bait. The response, other than to call him a liar (which is fair in this case), will be that Democrat plans are sustainable, in that they’ll create programs that benefit people rather than just throwing money out of helicopters.
That’s what I want them to do if I’m Trump. I want them to tout social programs which have proven to be (1) utterly ineffective, (2) full of moral hazard, and (3) ripe for the worst kind of fraud and corruption, so that I can say “forget about creating a welfare state which benefits a bunch of commie activists, I’ll just give you cash you can spend!”
Boom!
