{"id":2231,"date":"2025-11-11T17:07:50","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T17:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=2231"},"modified":"2025-11-11T17:07:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T17:07:50","slug":"trump-dangles-possibility-of-2k-dividend-checks-for-americans-amid-supreme-court-tariff-scrutiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/?p=2231","title":{"rendered":"Trump Dangles Possibility of $2K Dividend Checks for Americans Amid Supreme Court Tariff Scrutiny"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

President Donald Trump appeared to attempt to drum up support for his increasingly unpopular \u201creciprocal\u201d tariff regime\u2014which was\u00a0challenged in the nation\u2019s highest court last week\u2014by dangling the promise of hefty dividend checks for American citizens paid for with revenue from the duties.<\/p>\n

In an early morning Truth Social post on Monday, Trump dinged tariff detractors using familiar epithets, writing that the United States has been raking in trillions of dollars in duties that will be used to pay down the ballooning national debt (now worth about $37 trillion). In addition, \u201c[a] dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told ABC that the specifics of the massive payout to Americans hadn\u2019t yet been discussed by officials in depth. But he seemed to temper the president\u2019s claim, saying, \u201cThe $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms, in lots of ways. You know, it could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president\u2019s agenda\u2014you know, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans.\u201d So, no checks in the mail (a la Covid-19 stimulus), according to the country\u2019s chief of finance.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s restlessness over the fate of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs has been on display since they faced harsh scrutiny in a long-awaited\u00a0Supreme Court\u00a0hearing last Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Conservative judges evinced similar doubts to their liberal counterparts about the president\u2019s authority to wield the wide-ranging duties against more than 100 U.S. trading partners, and a number of the justices equated tariffs to taxes on Americans, which only Congress has the power to impose.<\/p>\n

Solicitor General D. John Sauer also appeared to contradict the president\u2019s oft-repeated justification for the tariffs: that they will line the country\u2019s coffers and Make America Rich Again, so to speak. Seeking to draw a line in the sand between tariffs and taxes, Sauer said the revenue raised by the duties is purely \u201cincidental,\u201d and that their primary function is to regulate foreign commerce. That assertion drew dubious replies from the justices.<\/p>\n

In questioning both Sauer and the lawyers for the petitioners, the justices sought to clarify whether IEEPA indicates or implies that tariffs can be used as a tool by the president in the event of an \u201cunusual and extraordinary threat\u201d from a source outside the U.S. The statute does not include the words \u201ctariffs\u201d or \u201cduties,\u201d the solicitor general admitted, though it does say the president can \u201cregulate\u201d imports and exports. Throughout the 69 instances that IEEPA has been leveraged since it was established in 1977, no other Commander in Chief has used it to impose tariffs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The justices now have the responsibility of parsing the parties\u2019 arguments and considering more than 40 \u201cfriend of the court\u201d briefs provided by all manner of stakeholders, from American businesses to lawmakers. The vast majority support the petitioners\u2019 case.<\/p>\n

For weeks leading up to and following the oral arguments, the Trump administration has hinted that it has\u00a0other tools in its toolbox to impose tariffs should the IEEPA duties be invalidated by the Supreme Court. Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, Section 301 or Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 may be among the levers left to pull. They each confer different authorities for imposing tariffs, but also contain provisions that threaten to slow Trump\u2019s heretofore rapid roll.<\/p>\n

The president alluded to these options on Sunday, writing, \u201cSo, let\u2019s get this straight??? The President of the United States is allowed (and fully approved by Congress!) to stop ALL TRADE with a Foreign Country (Which is far more onerous than a Tariff!), and LICENSE a Foreign Country, but is not allowed to put a simple Tariff on a Foreign Country, even for purposes of NATIONAL SECURITY.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Monday, the president\u2019s anxieties about the Supreme Court decision were palpable, mostly centering on what will happen if the federal government is forced to pay back the IEEPA duties it\u2019s collected already.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe actual Number we would have to pay back in Tariff Revenue and Investments would be in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars, and that, in itself, would be a National Security catastrophe,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Following the Supreme Court hearing, Jason Kenner, a lawyer for Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, explained that the refund process may not be straightforward. Should the petitioners prevail, they alone will be refunded as a direct result of the ruling.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs to a refund process, the solicitor for the for the states and importers raised the issue of potential protest, and that could be a possibility. It may take people filing their own actions in the Court of International Trade or Congress, or the courts may do some sort of legislative or judicial fix and order refunds,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s misgivings about the potentially disastrous impact that refunds could have on the federal government aren\u2019t likely to factor into the Supreme Court\u2019s decision, though Justice Amy Coney Barrett did query the lawyer for the petitioners, Neal Katyal, about whether doling out restitution to payees would be \u201ca mess.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think the messy nature of a refund process would justify finding the tariffs to be constitutional,\u201d Kenner said.<\/p>\n

And the process doesn\u2019t need to be a painful one, he argued. \u201cThe refund process doesn\u2019t have to be messy. It\u2019s only going to be messy if that\u2019s what the government wants to do,\u201d he said. \u201cCustoms takes in money; it refunds money on a daily basis. That\u2019s what it does. It has computer systems, it has all the data of who paid and how much they paid, and they can issue refunds electronically through their system.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump appeared to attempt to drum up support for his increasingly unpopular \u201creciprocal\u201d tariff regime\u2014which was\u00a0challenged<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2233,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions\/2233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}