Monopoly Money?

We've heard this song before. Once again Trump is promising to send people money. 

The latest, $500 to people supposedly overcharged on "Obamacare" user fees during, you guessed it, the Biden administration. The first thing I asked myself when I heard this was "What's an Obamacare User Fee?". I briefly had subsidized insurance through the ACA Marketplace in 2016 and was never charged a fee. Mainly because there wasn't one, not on individuals anyway. Insurance companies were charged a fee based on a percentage of the premiums that were collected. The fees were supposed to be used to defray the costs of running the program. Theoretically the costs of these fees could (and probably were) passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums, but I doubt any detailed forensic accounting has been done to determine how much each individual was overcharged, if it all. 

"Obamacare", The ACA, despite popular misconceptions, is not a health plan, is not an insurance plan, but is a matrix of connected laws regulating the health and health insurance industries. You can't but "Obamacare Insurance". Some insurance companies offer individual health insurance to individuals through a government-regulated "marketplace". Premiums are subsidized based on reported income. When filing their federal income tax return, an adjustment is made based on the reported income's deviation from the reported income. The purpose of the promised $500 checks is twofold: (1) To serve as a bribe to wavering voters and (2) To undermine the effectiveness of the ACA — an ongoing Republican and Trumpist goal. The second point ties into the announcement last week that a half million people would lose their ACA subsidized insurance due to murky claims of fraud (by insurance brokers, not individuals) with no public accounting of how this figure was arrived at. 

This isn't the first promise of free money that Trump promised to distribute. The $5,000 "DOGE Dividend" never materialized. Despite promises of the inaccurately named "Department of Government Efficiency" to root out waste, corruption, and fraud, it managed to achieve little more than chaos. It illegally eliminated programs and fired thousands of government employees. It's money saving efforts, when not completely fictional, were miniscule. We never got those checks.

Next was the "Trump Dividend" ostensibly a $2,000 rebate (or $5,000, depending on his mood) that supposedly represented all the extra billions (sometimes trillions) of dollars that the Treasury was raking in due to Trump's tariff hallucinations. The Supreme Court ruled that some of his tariffs were illegal and companies that paid them received refunds. But not individuals. Now we get another promise of free money — this time predicated upon the assumption that Republicans retain control of Congress — $5,000 to every adult. As much as my household could use another $10,000, I'd rather see the Republicans lose power in November. 

What's the authority for these dividends and rebates? The stimulus checks that went out at the end of the first Trump and in the Biden administration were debated and eventually approved by Congress. The Tariff Divided was debated by Congress, but went nowhere. Trump gets to claim he's for giving us money while blaming Congress for not doing it. 

Aside from authority, where is this money coming from? As of the end of August the annual deficit was close to $2 Trillion, with one month left to be calculated in the fiscal year 2026. Here's the annual deficits through the Trump and Biden years in trillions of dollars. 

• 2016 0.59
• 2017 0.67
• 2018 0.78
• 2019 0.98
• 2020 3.13 (Covid)
• 2021 2.77 (Covid)
• 2022 1.38
• 2023 1.70
• 2024 1.83
• 2025 1.78

A deficit means that we're spending more than we take in. Interest payments make up around half of that annual deficit. If we're in such dire shape fiscally, why not divert some of that we vacuumed up in tariffs and saved through DOGE into reducing the deficit. Maybe because it's not as much as we were told and the almost $2 trillion shortfall already takes into account these supposed tariff trillions and DOGE savings. 

What a bunch of bullshit.