No doubt you awoke Thursday morning to the sound of Democrat heads exploding over Donald Trump’s mid-term convention speech in Dallas last night, most notably regarding that promise of a $5,000 dividend to each American adult if the Republicans hold the Senate and House.
I stayed up and watched the entire 1 hour, 40-plus minute speech so you didn’t need to do so. I also watched the post speech analysis, although just on Fox.
Make no mistake, Fox long ago ceased being a Republican echo chamber and the usual suspects were questioning the Trump promise of a victory dividend, putting the cost at $1.3 trillion, give or take.
I’d been struggling to come up with a figure myself as the speech unfolded. A quick internet search produced an estimate of 260 million adults 18 years of age or older in these United States. Multiply that by $5,000 and you’re talking a lot of money, something like that $1.3 trillion figure.
Where would we get it? Just keep borrowing, of course. We are, after all, currently $40 trillion and counting in debt without even adding shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare funding to that indebtedness number.
Economics 101 tells us that such an influx of purchasing power – $5,000 per adult — without the ability of the market to produce commensurately more goods in the short run, would cause prices to increase. Worse, the prices would stay up even after all that money has passed through the economy.
Economically, I’m not fan of Trump’s $5,000 proposal. Politically, it might have been a master stroke.
Regardless, I don’t want to hear hypocritical Democrats decrying it as buying votes. Trump is just playing their game.
Recall Mamdani the Commie winning as New York City mayor by promising free stuff, from bus rides, to subsidized housing and food. Also recall him failing to deliver on the grand giveaway offers. But he was elected, so it worked.
Democrat presidential and congressional hopefuls are crisscrossing the country trying to “buy” votes with promises of taxing the rich to provide free college, free health care, universal basic income and other giveaways financed on the backs of the productive.
I’ve seen reports that local, state and federal governments routinely spend numbers like $5,000 a week, or a month, to provide food, lodging and healthcare on each of the illegals flocking to sanctuary cities.
A copilot AI search came up with estimates of between $4.9 and $12 billion having been spent by New York City alone on migrants between 2023 and 2025. Those numbers are likely skyrocketing.
You think all the Somali scamsters haven’t raided Minnesota’s public coffers for substantial coin?
Buying votes is Democrat history.
In 2020, aspiring Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang had a campaign plank of giving $1,000 a month to each adult. That’s $12,000 a year, year after year after year, not a $5,000 one-time payment. And it wasn’t enough to get Yang the nomination. Presumably, he was just early.
Way back in my youth, George McGovern (yes, a Democrat) was tossing around the idea during his campaign of paying $1,000 per person, not $1,000 per adult. As a poverty-stricken high school student, it sounded like a stroke of genius to me.
McGovern seemed fixated on 1,000. When it was revealed that his VP pick, Thomas Eagleton, had been hospitalized multiple times for depression and endured electroshock treatments several times, McGovern famously proclaimed he was 1,000 percent behind Eagleton, shortly before dumping him for would-be Kennedy Sargent Shriver.
Because 1972 voters were largely rational types, Richard Nixon won an electoral landslide, 520-17. McGovern carried just Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., insanely leftist precincts even back then.
Democrats, the party that welcomes illegals, criminals, the sexually confused, grifters and socialists into it’s so-called “big tent,” should lose just as hugely in the 2026 mid-terms. But they won’t.
Republicans are facing an uphill battle to defy mid-term election history that shows the ruling party losing ground as surely as Democrats try to buy votes.
Trump’s job last night was to attempt to convince Republicans to vote like their lives depend on it. The fact that he threw out that $5,000 trial balloon is an indication of how pivotal this election looms if this nation is to stem its lurch toward lawlessness and socialism.
Sam Ross Jr's site 