Calling a $5,000 check to every American adult “bribery” is a category error. The federal government already distributes trillions to specific constituencies — Social Security recipients, Medicare beneficiaries, defense contractors, farmers, the tip workers the 2025 tax bill just exempted, the upper-income households who got the 2017 cut. The argument isn’t whether Washington hands out money. It’s whose hands the money lands in. In his National Review column on Trump’s Houston pledge, Charles C. W. Cooke calls the $5,000 “dividend” a “reckless, shapeless, irritable spasm” on the grounds that voters aren’t shareholders, the United States has no profits to share, and the $1.3 trillion price tag would crash a budget already carrying $40 trillion in debt. He’s half right. The half he’s right about I’ll get to. The half he’s wrong about is more interesting.
Alaska has paid every man, woman, and child an actual dividend since 1982. It’s called the Permanent Fund Dividend. It comes from oil revenue — public resource wealth that belongs to everyone, not just the executives who pump it. The 2024 payout was $1,602 per eligible recipient. It’s wildly popular in a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968. It’s literally a dividend. By Cooke’s own definition, Alaska has been bribing its citizens for forty-three years.
So the word isn’t the scandal. The phrase “trillions in debt” might be — but only if it’s applied consistently.
The 2017 Trump tax cut added roughly $1.9 trillion to the federal debt over its first decade, per the Congressional Budget Office, and the benefits flowed mostly to the top 10 percent of earners. The 2025 Trump tax bill — which Cooke calls “corrupted” but still treats as the baseline of fiscal seriousness — accelerated that tilt: bigger exemptions for tip income, deductions for residents of high-tax states (a polite way of saying rich people in blue states), continued bonanza for pass-through businesses. Independent estimates put its additional ten-year cost at somewhere in the $3 to $4 trillion range. So: $1.3 trillion debt-financed for 250 million adults is “bribery.” Three-plus trillion debt-financed for a few million households is “sensible reform that got corrupted.” The corruption is the direction the money went.
And here’s the part Cooke won’t write, because writing it would commit him to a real program instead of a column: the structure that makes a $5,000 check tempting is the same structure that has been compounding the deficit for fifteen years. Social Security pays out about $1.5 trillion a year. Medicare pays out roughly $900 billion. Interest on the debt alone is closing in on $1 trillion. Those three lines together already eat more than total federal revenue. Everything else the government does — courts, defense, air traffic control — is borrowed money. The mandatory budget was underwater before Trump took his oath the second time. The check is a wave on a sea that was already rough.
Cooke’s whole column stands on a small, sharp axiom: there is no reason — none — for the federal government to send money equally to every adult. He says so explicitly. “There is no reason whatsoever that each adult in America should be sent money from the federal government; there is no reason that, if it is to be sent, that money should be equally allocated.” Strip away the Micawber, the Dickens, the constitutional lecture, and what’s left is the assertion that public revenue is not, and never can be, a public asset. Once you accept that premise, every Social Security check, every Medicare benefit, every farm subsidy, every defense contract is a hand-out to the undeserving.
A universal payment from public revenue is not socialism. Norway built a roughly $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund from its oil — same playbook as Alaska’s, scaled up — and it owns about 1.5 percent of every public company on earth. The fund has been running since 1990. Norway is a high-tax, open-market capitalist country with one of the freest economies on the planet. The dividend didn’t nationalize anything. It just let the public share in wealth their tax dollars and their resources created.
Cooke’s strongest true point is that Trump was returned to office to fight inflation and has instead made it worse — tariffs up, public pressure on the Fed for rate cuts, fiscal expansion on top of an economy already running hot. Conceded. Trump’s failure on prices is real. So is Biden’s, so is the Fed’s, so is every administration that ran deficits above the growth rate and let the central bank monetize the gap. The 2020 stimulus was followed by inflation, and at least some of the price acceleration is attributable to the flood of cash into an economy that hadn’t yet reopened. Debt-financed one-time payments without structural funding are bad economics. If Trump is borrowing $1.3 trillion from our kids’ future to buy midterms, that is, in fact, irresponsible. Real cost. Cooke is right to flag it.
But the way to fix the bribe problem is not to abolish the dividend idea. It’s to fund the dividend honestly.
The Micawber framing — annual income twenty pounds, expenditure nineteen-and-six, happiness; twenty pounds, expenditure twenty-and-six, misery — is supposed to land as the column’s closing shot. It lands flat. The federal government has been running the misery version of that arithmetic for fifteen years. The Trump check isn’t the moment Micawber warned about. It’s just the next quarterly report in a slow-motion disaster that’s been compounding since at least 2009, through three Republican Congresses, two Democratic presidents, and a Federal Reserve that bought every bond the Treasury could issue.
Here’s the version that works, and that Cooke should be able to love if he meant a single word of the fiscal-responsibility lecture: a federal sovereign wealth fund. Alaska has one. Norway has one — roughly $2 trillion of it, the largest in the world. Texas has oil too, and a Permanent School Fund that’s supposed to benefit public schools but rarely lands in a parent’s hands. The difference between Alaska’s fund and Texas’s isn’t geology. It’s whether the public sees the money. A federal fund, capitalized by federal resource royalties, federal land leases, spectrum auctions, and the windfall from Trump’s own tariffs, could pay a real dividend every year without adding a dollar to the deficit. Federal mineral royalties alone run around $10 billion a year. Federal land and timber receipts add several billion more. Spectrum auctions vary wildly but have hit tens of billions in past years. Tariff revenue, depending on policy, can run into the hundreds of billions.
That’s not enough to fund a $5,000-per-adult dividend on day one — but capitalize the fund at $200 billion a year for a decade and you’d have a roughly $2 trillion asset base. Pay out at a sustainable 3 percent draw, that’s about $60 billion a year, which works out to a few hundred dollars per adult. To reach $5,000 a year, the fund would have to grow for another decade after that, or be paired with additional revenue streams. Norway took forty years to get to its present scale. The institution is older than most of the politicians arguing about it.
And if Cooke wants fiscal discipline before he gets his dividend, here are four things — none of which he endorses, all of which he could.
First, end the entitlement autopilot. Social Security and Medicare are programmed to grow faster than wages and faster than the economy. Tie their growth to a demographic formula. Do it on a schedule so people can plan.
Second, hold mandatory spending flat as a share of GDP for ten years. Everything in the discretionary budget is rounding error. The fight is in the mandatory lines.
Third, base-broaden the tax code. Lower the rates. Kill the deductions, the carveouts, the tip exemption, the state-and-local preference. Tax productivity at a rate the economy can carry.
Fourth, audit and constrain the Federal Reserve. A central bank that monetizes deficits is the silent partner of every irresponsible Congress.
Cooke wants the $5,000 check gone and the structure that produced it untouched. That isn’t fiscal conservatism. That’s triage. The economy is a set of choices, not the weather. The choice here isn’t between fiscal discipline and socialism. It’s between letting public wealth concentrate upward, or building the institution that lets everyone share in it. Alaska figured that out before I was born. The rest of us can catch up.