LloydBond

Last year, I proposed the $5,000 DOGE Dividend that President Trump endorsed. Trump just announced a new $5,000 dividend. It's a bad idea. Here's why: the DOGE Dividend was financed by DOGE spending cuts. (Cut waste, save money, send a portion of it back to taxpayers.) This new “dividend” has no offsetting spending cuts. It's just new spending financed by more borrowing from China that adds to the $40 trillion in national debt when government borrowing costs (10-year Treasury yields) are already the highest in 3 years. Unlike the DOGE Dividend, which was only to be sent to taxpayers, the new "dividend" check gets sent to everyone, which means non-taxpayers get more free money, which means more inflation. This dividend will actually worsen the problem it tries to solve. Inflation has never been solved by spending more money. If you want to save Americans money right now, end the Iran War. Here's how much President Trump could save us by doing it. Start with gas. It was $2.98 a gallon the day before the war began. Today, it's $4.22. $1.24 more per gallon, on 700 gallons a year for the average household, which comes out to about $900 a year in savings by bringing gas prices back to where they were before the war. Now look at diesel, which matters even more. Diesel was $3.65 a gallon before the war. Today it's $5.94, an all-time high. That's a 63% increase in 6 months. You may never buy a gallon of diesel in your life. You pay for it anyway. Diesel moves freight. It runs the trucks, the trains, the barges, the combines, and the tractors. Nearly every item on a shelf got there on diesel, which means diesel never shows up as a line item in a family budget. It shows up in the price of everything else. America burns roughly 61 billion gallons of it a year. At $2.29 more per gallon, that is about $140 billion in added cost moving through the supply chain, or roughly $1,000 per household once it reaches the register. Gas and diesel together: about $1,900 a year for the average American family. End the war and put crude oil prices back where they were in February, and the average American family saves $9,500 over the next 5 years. That is almost double the dividend check. It arrives every year instead of once. It requires no borrowing, no appropriation, and no new debt sold to China. I developed the DOGE Dividend because cutting wasteful spending creates real savings, from which taxpayers can and should receive a dividend check. This new "dividend" does not do that. It's ironic that at a time when Republicans are rightly calling out socialism on the left, they would make their closing pitch at their national convention: "if you vote for us, we'll give you $5,000 and make someone else pay for it." If that isn't socialism, I don't know what is.

There is not a dollar in this country that should be sent abroad, least of all to *that* country. No American should EVER die for Israel. Period.