Donald Trump has floated the possibility of sending out refund checks to Americans with some of the savings he says the Department of Government Efficiency have cut from the budget, but a Wall Street Journal reporter said that plan was laughable.
MAGA-aligned investment manager James Fishback first promoted that idea of a "DOGE dividend," which he says came to him in a dream, and it gained traction online Tuesday after Elon Musk posted on his X platform that he would "check" with the president about the possibility, which Trump acknowledged the next day by saying he would consider giving 20 percent of those savings back to Americans.
"His policies upcoming, in the view of economists, are inflationary," said CNN host Jim Sciutto. "A tax cut is inflationary and tariffs are inflationary, so how does he square that circle?"
New polling shows that 62 percent of adults nationwide feel Trump hasn't done enough to reduce the price of everyday goods, which he promised on the campaign trail he would do immediately, and the Journal's senior political correspondent Molly Ball said the "DOGE dividend" scheme was clearly intended to goose his approval rating.
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"I think that those are the numbers in the poll that pose the most risk to Trump going forward," Ball said. "This idea that he's focused on the wrong things because, look, a lot of Americans bought the idea during the election that the reason you're suffering, the reason you're struggling is because we're spending all this money on foreign countries, foreign aid, giving away the store, being played for suckers, sending it all to Ukraine."
"You know, numerically, that wasn't true in the sense that, you know, the amounts that we're spending, you know, the amounts that Elon Musk is getting out of this DOGE, they are pennies compared to the federal budget," Ball added. "They're not enough to send thousands of dollars to every American, and what I think people are seeing now is that the idea that by tearing down this foreign aid structure or by taking away the money we were sending from Ukraine, the idea that that would make everybody's lives better doesn't seem to be happening, doesn't seem to be bearing fruit."
DOGE claims to have saved the American public $55 billion off the federal budget and listed more than 1,000 federal contracts it claims to have terminated, as well as additional cuts to the workforce and other areas, but those total up to about $8.6 billion.
"People are giving him time," Ball said. "People are looking at this saying, he's been president for a month, let's see how this plays out. Let's see if Elon is successful. Let's see if I end up benefiting, they're going to give him that honeymoon, but they're going to get impatient pretty quickly."
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