Liz Peek: A DOGE dividend could be a win-win-win for the GOP and Team Trump
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5155741-elon-musk-doge-dividend-trump-gop
With Democrats screaming that the sky is falling with each federal workerthe Department of Government Efficiency axes, Elon Musk’s team needs some good public relations.
James Fishback, CEO of “free-thinking” investment firm Azoria, has an excellent idea.
Fishback made headlines recently by posting on X that, “President Trump and Elon Musk should propose a DOGE dividend — a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.”
Musk, who evidently sleeps with one eye trained on his X feed, sounded positive about the proposition, responding, “Will check with the president.”
Why not? What better way to bring home to people the benefits of cutting waste and fraud out of the federal budget?
Fishback explains his plan: “Our proposal for the President is simple: tax-paying households should receive $1 for every $5 of total savings that DOGE delivers. That means that if DOGE delivers $2 trillion in total savings, 79 million American households will receive a $5,000 check next summer because of President Trump’s bold leadership.”
Imagine the benefits:
- Sending out checks will make DOGE’s success real, tangible and celebrated. Nobody dislikes getting money in the mail.
- Taxpayers, whose money has been funneled into distasteful and wasteful ventures like spending $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia or $2.5 million to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, will catch a rare break — finally!
- Democrats, who have reflexively and idiotically opposed DOGE’s efforts, will be silenced. Given their resistance — and their lack of leadership and message — they will not retake the House or the Senate in the midterm elections. Republicans will own what will come to be the most popular initiative ever undertaken by either party — reforming our bloated inefficient government and returning to taxpayers money that would have been wasted.
- Additionally, the dividend will mean that the more spending DOGE purges from the $6 trillion federal budget, the bigger the checks will be. That means the country will be rooting for more cuts and more closings, cheering on Musk and his DOGGIES at every turn.
- If reducing government spending pinches growth, which it could, putting some money in consumers’ pockets would provide a valuable offset. One of the reasons the economy grew robustly while Joe Biden was in the White House is that he spent money recklessly, creating the kinds of deficits usually reserved for fighting wars or deep recessions.
Critics of Trump and Musk were quick to doubt that any of this would materialize, of course, but then naysayers have written off the DOGE team and their prospects from the start. Politico pooh-poohed the dividend possibility, writing, “Budget experts warn that such a rebate program would require congressional approval, and lawmakers may prefer to use that money in other ways.” They are correct, of course, but show me a Republican member of Congress who will not support a little freebie going to overburdened taxpayers heading into the midterms, especially when it comes from their own team.
Does DOGE need more favorable support? Yes, it is under relentless attack from Democrats and their media allies who are fear-mongering and spinning dishonest narratives about how Musk’s team is not just slicing off fat but dangerously cutting into the bone.
For example, Gayle King on CBS recently asked the CEO of Delta Airlines whether job cuts at the Federal Aviation Administration might have played a role in recent plane “mishaps,” by reducing the number of air traffic controllers or safety inspectors working at the agency. “Do those cuts worry you?” she asked.
The airline’s chief, Ed Bastian, denied categorically that DOGE’s efforts to trim staff had any connection to recent crashes, responding, “The cuts do not affect us … the reality is there are over 50,000 people that work at the FAA; the cuts I understand were 300 people in non-critical safety functions.”
The Delta CEO goes on to enumerate the areas where the Trump administration is working to improve airline safety, including upgrading the (notoriously outdated) technology available to air traffic controllers, hiring additional controllers and safety inspectors and taking other long-overdue measures to make our skies safer.
Elsewhere, CNBC published a lengthy piece provocatively titled: “Trump’s drive to reshape government threatens bird flu response.” The author reports that a shut-down of “nearly all external communications” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has meant that “state and local public health officials have gone weeks without regular updates on avian flu.” But the temporary freeze on reports went into effect Jan. 22 and was lifted Feb. 1 — the agency was incommunicado for all of 10 days.
The real dereliction of duty regarding avian flu turns out to have come from Joe Biden’s White House, although that revelation does not appear until more than 30 paragraphs in: “Public health researchers have said the Biden administration didn’t react quickly enough to stop the spread of the virus among dairy cattle after it was first detected in herds in March. It wasn’t until December that the Agriculture Department rolled out a national milk testing program.”
As Kevin Hassett says, “It turns out, President Biden’s team didn’t have an avian flu strategy.”
What a surprise.
The attacks on Elon Musk and his DOGE team have been relentless, and they have taken a toll on the tech wizard’s popularity. Nonetheless, according to RealClearPolitics, DOGE has an overall favorable approval rating. Given that the country has an unprecedented $36 trillion debt burden, and that the federal bureaucracy is stuffed with inefficient, redundant and useless programs, everyone should be on board with Musk’s reforms.
A DOGE dividend could get them there, and boost Republicans’ prospects of maintaining control of the House and Senate in the midterms. That would give Trump and his DOGE-ies two more years to track down and eliminate the waste and fraud that permeates the federal government.
That would be a triple-win for Team Trump.
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