Checks Mix

In a move not at all related to the latest election results or the impending Supreme Court decision on tariffs, Donald Trump announced over the weekend on social media that we are all getting at least $2000 from the government. Our windfall is due to the immense success of the Republican tariff scheme, Trump said. “People that are against tariffs are FOOLS!,” he added. Yay! I hope the checks are signed by Donnie just like he signed that naughty birthday card for his good buddy and dating wingman, Jeffrey.

(Hey, what ever happened to those files?)

Oops, I said “all of us.” That’s not quite right. What Trump said was, “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.” I am certainly not a high-income person, and neither is my wife. I imagine I will use my big, fat check to buy something nice for her. She will probably spend hers on cat toys and parts for her moonshine still.

Oops, again. Our free money might not come in the form of checks. According to the Trump administration’s resident soybean farmer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the form of payment is unsettled and could include tax changes instead of immediate checks. That is not cool. You can always count on a super-wealthy soybean farmer to throw cold water on your cat-toy-funding plan. Tax changes won’t arrive in time to put toys in kitties’ Christmas stockings or corn squeezin’s in our eggnog.

I was a bit unplugged over the weekend, as I was the guest of honor at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball in Fargo on Saturday. In my humble opinion, a guest of honor should not have to scoop kitty litter, but my wife doesn’t have quite so fine a sense of etiquette. She also believes my guest-of-honor title expired somewhere between Fargo and Minot—probably Valley City, or even sooner, in her mind.

So, I didn’t know about the tariff “dividend” announcement until I opened Ground News on Monday morning and found that the story was reported by over 400 news sources, with almost half of them rated as center-biased and around three quarters of the remaining sources rated as biased to the right, from lean right to far right.

This story is what Ground News calls a “Blindspot” for the left. Twice as many sources from the right are reporting the story than from the left, and less than one-sixth of the sources overall have a left bias rating. A person in a left-of-center information silo could miss it. This is why I often start my day in the Blindspot Feed: It let’s me see what I might otherwise miss, and there are some important stories there along with the crazy talking points and rationalizations I like to poke fun at. My wife and I missed this story at first because we were intentionally unplugged for the weekend and listened to music and an episode of the This is Actually Happening podcast as we drove home.¹

Speaking of podcasts, this story was mentioned on a few of them. My wife, Kelli, listens to podcasts way more than I do, and she sends me links with timestamps for the parts she thinks I should listen to. On Monday, I discovered that Ground News provides podcast mentions of stories with timestamps, and they don’t try to sneak in any relationship advice. So, I now love Ground News just a little bit more without loving my wife any less. The “Podcasts and Opinions” section precedes the print stories and is a new feature. It is definitely useful for me because podcasts can be long, and I tend to hear the first couple of minutes and then the part where the hosts say they hope I will join them again next time.

If you want timestamped podcast links without any annoying lists of things good husbands do, you can still get 40% off the Ground News unlimited-access Vantage plan (what I have) using my link, groundnews.com/punch or by clicking the button below.

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On the xxxxxx Takes podcast, Sam Stein and Jack Cocchiarella talked about how Farmer Bessent is “going to have to literally cash some checks that Donald Trump is writing.” Instead of breezing through a Sunday morning interview on ABC, Bessent had what we in Naval Aviation call a “helmet fire in flight.” To his credit, Bessent knew that what Trump was proposing would cost many times more than what Americans have paid the U.S. government in tariffs. He couldn’t say that Trump’s post was ridiculous, so he suggested that our $2000 might come in many forms or might already be accounted for in the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the bill that will make many Americans’ health insurance premiums go up by more than $2000.

Even far-right-rated Slay News pointed out that the best expectations for tariff revenues would cover less than a third of the current fiscal-year deficit, so Trump’s talk of paying down the debt with tariffs is a fantasy.

I want to believe it, though, so I sought out a post from a source on the right that would be more optimistic about my $2000 check. Even Breitbart wouldn’t go that far. Fortunately, J.D. Rucker at The Liberty Daily (“The Conservative Alternative to the Drudge Report”), gave me hope. He concluded his Sunday, November 9th piece with this:

“Wow. It’s a bold move. Not only would Americans benefit from the windfall, but the economy itself would be bolstered by increased spending. And while there are questions about how he can pay down the national debt and still have money left over for what could be half-a-trillion dollars in dividends, we remain hopeful that it can happen.”

Thank you, J.D. Rucker! Sure, Ground News gives The Liberty Daily a Mixed-Factuality rating, but you have to give up something when you are confirmation biasing in search of the answer you want. They say, “Happy wife, happy life,” and I need some hope in pursuit of those corn sqeezin’s and cat toys.

Of course, most of the articles curated by Ground News about this topic seemed skeptical that we were going to get $2000+ checks from Uncle Sam. I suppose it is better to be accurately informed than groundlessly hopeful, and being informed in a balanced way is why I use Ground News every day. During my run for Congress last year, I said in an interview that I would like to see something like an Underwriters Laboratories for news sources. That entity now exists. And again, you can get 40% off the Ground News unlimited-access Vantage plan (what I have) using my link, groundnews.com/punch or by clicking the button below.

Get 40% off the Vantage Plan