A Trump DOGE Dividend Could Raise Inflation

ImageDealBook’s Lauren Hirsch is in Miami Beach at the FII Priority conference, where President Trump floated the idea of sending Americans a dividend or refund check from money saved by DOGE rather than use all of it to pay down the debt.More below.Separately, since you may read about this elsewhere, I thought I’d share with you a secret I’ve been keeping: For the past eight years, I’ve been working on a follow-up to my book, “Too Big to Fail.” I’ve written what I think of as a prequel: a nonfiction, character-driven, behind-the-scenes account of 1929, the year of the most infamous market crash of all time.

The book will be out in October.I’ll talk more about it then.Trump floats a new stimulus ideaPresident Trump swept into Miami Beach on Wednesday to speak at the FII Priority conference with yet another eyebrow-raising idea: using the savings he says Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is finding to send taxpayers checks and repay the national debt.It isn’t clear whether this would actually happen.

But Trump’s potential move — described to a crowd that included Musk; Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google; and Michael Klein, the deal-maker mogul — raises questions about the president’s economic priorities.What Trump described: forking over 20 percent of the savings that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency initiative has cut from government spending “to American citizens” and 20 percent to paying down the national debt.(He didn’t say what would happen to the remaining 60 percent.)What is Trump actually trying to accomplish? He has promised to cut the national debt, though critics say his plans for sweeping tax cuts and more would aggravate the nation’s fiscal burden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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