Republicans accused Biden of trying to bribe voters. Now they're doing the same. | Opinion
I shouldn't have to remind a sitting senator, much less the president, of basic economics, but here goes: You can't just hand out money.
- Sen. Josh Hawley proposed legislation for $600 rebate checks for Americans, claiming the funds are derived from Trump-era tariffs.
- Paste BN columnist Dace Potas argues that this proposal is fiscally irresponsible, contributing to inflation or the national debt, as tariff revenue doesn't cover the proposed spending.
- Potas criticizes Hawley and President Trump for using populist tactics to bribe voters, comparing it to Biden's student loan forgiveness plan and Hawley's support for pandemic stimulus checks.
- The author contends that Hawley's proposal demonstrates economic illiteracy and prioritizes vote-buying over sound economic policy.
On July 28, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, announced legislation that would provide Americans with $600 “rebate checks,” supposedly due to the vast swathes of money being collected from President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.
Hawley’s proposal comes just days after Trump suggested the idea himself.
I shouldn’t have to remind a sitting senator, much less the president, of basic economics, but here goes. You can’t just hand out money; doing so is either inflationary or adds to the deficit.
MAGA is hurting Americans’ wallets through tariff policy, and pretending as if the results have been so beneficial that we can afford to pay Americans a share of the benefit. All of this is an economically illiterate scheme to bribe voters, nothing more. It's not conservative fiscal policy. None of it.
Josh Hawley's rebate check proposal built on bad fiscal policy
Hawley’s proposal doesn’t function as a rebate because the government doesn’t have money to rebate. It's not as if Americans have paid too much in taxes, and the government is now returning those funds to their rightful owners.
"Americans deserve a tax rebate after four years of Biden policies that have devastated families’ savings and livelihoods," Halwey said in a statement. "Like President Trump proposed, my legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country.”
For Americans to truly experience a rebate, the government needs to be in a budget surplus. If we are in a budget deficit, any form of spending comes from two sources. The first is through printing new money, which is the simplest way to create inflation. The second way is through borrowing money, which adds to the national debt, requiring higher revenue in the future to cover current spending.
In the first eight months of fiscal year 2025, the federal budget deficit totaled $1.4 trillion. Such dire finances are worsened by the fact that Republicans passed a budget in July that is expected to skyrocket the deficit by, after accounting for interest costs, roughly $3.8 trillion over the next decade.
If the $600 rebate were claimed by every man, woman and child in America, as Hawley suggested, this proposal would cost more than $205 billion.
Even if narrowed to just those who filed an individual tax return, of which there were roughly 163 million in 2023, that cost would total nearly $98 billion.
The United States has only generated about $125 billion from tariffs as of the end of July, a sizable increase from previous years but not enough to cover anything close to our budget deficit.
As it is, Hawley is promising to refund Americans for revenue that doesn’t come close to paying for all of our government spending. Republicans, under MAGA leadership, are continuing to run our country's finances into the ground.
MAGA is playing voters for fools with tariffs
Tariffs, in themselves, mean that retailers inevitably pass along these additional import costs to producers. It is a cruel joke to hike people’s cost of living through tariffs, then pretend to pay them back with money you don’t have, in turn causing more costs to taxpayers down the road.
In reality, all of this is just another populist attempt to bribe Americans into voting for more MAGA economics (if you can call it that). The economic illiteracy of the MAGA movement is frankly tiring. Federal spending is a political tool to entice Americans to vote MAGA, while Republican policies actually hurt working Americans.
Republicans often criticize Democrats when they attempt to employ similar strategies, as seen with the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness. But now, here are Republican leaders proposing to bribe voters.
Hawley seemingly hasn’t learned his lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he was a cosponsor of stimulus checks. The massive rise in government spending during the pandemic was a chief cause of the inflation that followed, and such action now is likely to yield the same results.
Now, Trump and Hawley are drawing from the same playbook. If they had their way, America would be saddled with the financial consequences while they remain just fine. Hawley is one of the worst offenders of basic economics in the Senate and is much closer to a fiscal socialist than any sort of conservative. It is worrying that he continues to float his damaging proposals.
Nobody in Trump’s faction of the GOP has any interest in producing sound economic policy. Their only motivation is attempting to buy votes. Hawley’s proposals only reveal that fact even more.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for Paste BN and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.