3 min read

The Trump/Vance Bill

The Trump/Vance Bill
Image by AS Photograpy from Pixabay

What is each household paying for the Trump/Vance program so far?   Enough data is flying around, we can start to approximate it.

The DOGE Dividend

Elon Musk and his DOGE team have been very public about how much they are saving and have advocated for turning these savings into a “DOGE Dividend” check for each household.  The DOGE website regularly publishes how much it saves for all of us — $932 per household as of earlier this week.   And that is great, though with the overall deficit situation, none of us will see a check for $932, let alone $5000.  While the DOGE effort is largely misguided, I still can respect that Elon tried to deliver some benefit to taxpayers and was effective at doing so in his ham-fisted way.  

However, even if the DOGE savings were reflected in a check to each taxpayer, they would be swamped by the costs imposed on each household by the Trump/Vance administration.

The Tariff Tax

The administration isn’t quick to advertise the impacts of their other programs.    Let’s start with tariffs.  The Yale Budget Lab looks at the household impact of tariffs — they estimate that this is an average annual cost of $3,800 per household — and this is after the recent pause.   You’d need 4+ DOGE checks a year to make that up.  Let’s hope that sanity continues to re-enter the tariff discussion.  

The Stock Market Slump

The tariffs are linked to stock market performance. At the beginning of the year, the median household had $52,000 in stock market investments. Thanks to all the tariff gyrations, stocks have been solidly down since Inauguration Day and down dramatically over the past week. The median household is down $6,906, which will take years to recover from at typical stock market return rates.

Social Services Cutbacks

It is not yet clear what level of social services the administration will cut. Early efforts via DOGE have been rumored to cut at least $2B in benefits. The budget discussions are tossing around numbers like $2T in deficit reduction over 10 years, $200B a year, or even up to $5.3 T. At $2T, that is $1,500 per household per year in lost services.

Research Funding

The administration has also been whacking research programs. So far, $9B has been cut from the NSF, with more in limbo, and NIH funding at risk as well. Various estimates exist for the downstream impact of research funding on the economy — a 5x multipler is commonly thrown around. So that is another $340 loss for each household.  And this is probably vastly understated — I hear anecdotally that so many researchers and grad students are looking for non-US opportunities; we are on the cusp of terribly harmful brain drain.

Putting it All Together

Some of these numbers are annualized, some are one time impacts, so it is hard to compare them all — but I will jam them all in a graph anyway!   Each household gets a little bit of payback from DOGE cuts (even tho they will never see the check), and then it is all washed away ten times over by the costs of the programs.  The experiment is draining us.   

And this is the median picture.   Lower-income families won’t have any stock holdings.   But the tariff impact hits everyone; the loss of social services is going to hit some families a lot more (and they may be the neediest families); the DOGE savings come from job losses that are devastating to a lot of families.  Some households are really experiencing a lot of pain.  

Meanwhile, none of the benefits the administration touts have come to pass:

And the budget plan is not settled — taxpayers could end up paying more in taxes.  And the inflationary effects and the weakening of the dollar will drain even more from our pockets.

Americans have shown in the past that they are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.   This is a large set of sacrifices, and it is not at all clear what the greater good is.