I'm going to 'try to be a good reporter' when it comes to the Trump $5,000 dividend checks that 'Professor Nathan Hale' assures me will come from tariffs the US has already taken in. Here goes... $5,000 to every adult U.S. citizen costs about $1.2 trillion. Gross tariff collections from Jan 2025–July 2026 were about $328 billion. After the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, Treasury has already refunded about $115 billion to importers/companies, with tens of billions more still owed. After those additional required $50 billion in refunds (plus interest) net from that haul drops closer to $160 billion. That’s about 13% of the $1.2 trillion needed for the Trump dividend checks. That's a shortfall of $1.04 trillion. The national debt would grow from $40 trillion to $41.04 trillion. Hypothetically, even if SCOTUS had allowed every cent taken in from tariffs to stay in place, there would have still been a shortfall of $872 billion for these 5k checks. Perfect world scenario for Trump: The tariffs would've covered 27% of the 5k checks if SCOTUS had upheld the tariffs. It didn't, so tariffs only cover 13% of the 5k checks. Thank you for requesting this exercise from me, @ProfNathanHale. I trust this was more useful for you than my 'usual clickbait slop '