If the White House handing out $2,000 checks to all U.S. citizens sounded too good to be true, it just might be. At least, that’s now the sentiment among bettors.
Earlier this month, President Trump made an official promise of a “dividend” payable to all Americans. Posting on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, the president wrote that tariff opponents were “fools” and added: “record investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place.” He continued: “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
Since then, excitement around the project has dimmed. According to speculators betting on the odds market site Kalshi, there’s now just a 2% chance that Americans will receive such a check anytime soon. These odds have dropped considerably from the week following Trump’s announcement, when the market priced a more than 13% likelihood of the rebates being paid out.
Indeed, the odds tracker isn’t even assuming the promise of a $2,000 check—it’s based on the odds of a million Americans being given notice of an $1,000 check, and the verified details being reported (not the payouts completed) by Jan. 1.
Over at Polymarket, the crypto-based probability trading platform, the odds of Americans receiving a check before Dec. 31 have fallen to just 1%, down from 50% on Nov. 15.
In the days since President Trump made the pledge, members of his cabinet have poured cold water on the plans. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Nov. 9, shortly after the post from Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted he hadn’t yet talked to the president about the dividend plan, adding it would require Congress to pass legislation.
Bessent also attempted to unpick the form the tariff stimulus would take, perhaps not a check but in relief already signed into law: “The $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms…it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. Those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill.”
Doing the math
Bessent’s caution may be justified, as the president has also stated that some tariff revenue will also go toward paying down America’s “enormous” $38 trillion national debt burden. While tariffs are bringing in a significant sum—approximately $30 billion a month by September 2025—that revenue is minor compared even to the interest the U.S. government is paying to service its debt.
Treasury data shows the interest paid on national debt for FY2025 is $1.22 trillion, and rising every year. Even if President Trump’s tariff collection continues to rake in $30 billion a month and $360 billion a year, this still amounts to a little over a third of the interest payments on the debt—it doesn’t touch the debt itself.
Trump’s $2,000 plan is also eye-wateringly costly. Even if the government were to pay each household—as opposed to each individual—in the bottom 50% of earners, that would still require payouts to more than 67.5 million homes, per data from the St. Louis Fed. That would imply that $135 billion, nearly half of the tariff revenues, would immediately be paid out to citizens instead of being directed toward national debt.
Yet despite further caveats from Bessent in the past few days, Trump doubled down on the plan yesterday. “We’re going to be issuing dividends later on, somewhere prior to…probably the middle of next year, a little bit later than that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, according to Axios. The payments, he said, would go to “individuals of moderate income, middle income.”
