(NewsNation) — President Donald Trump says a tariff dividend is coming for American families, but betting markets don’t expect checks anytime soon.
Earlier this month, Trump said on Truth Social that a dividend of “at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!)” would be paid to “everyone” but offered few details about the plan.
Traders on the prediction market platform Kalshi see just a 2% chance that Americans receive tariff stimulus checks this year — down from about 13% shortly after Trump’s announcement.
Bettor sentiment weakened after Trump told reporters Monday that tariff dividends would be issued “later on,” probably “the middle of next year” or even “a little bit later than that.” He said the dividends would be “thousands of dollars” for “individuals of moderate income, middle income.”
On Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, traders put the odds of a tariff dividend by March 31 at roughly 10% — down from over 40% last week.
When asked recently whether direct payments of $2,000 would actually go out to Americans, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it would require Congress.
“We will see. We need legislation for that,” Bessent told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “Everything is on the table.”
Bessent continued: “[The dividends] would be for working families. We’ll have an income limit.”
Tariff dividend plan draws skepticism
Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of rebate checks funded by tariff revenues, but the plan has faced criticism and doubts about its feasibility.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board described Trump’s proposed $2,000 tariff rebate as a “Hail Mary pass” intended to “dull the public’s tariff pain.”
“This is a new version of the age-old income redistribution game of taxing people too much but then trying to appease them with tax credits or one-time cash payments,” the editorial board wrote in a recent opinion.
As of mid-November, the U.S. has brought in $229 billion in gross tariff and certain other excise tax revenue in 2025, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. That’s up from about $83 billion at the same point last year but still well short of what would be required to fund a $2,000 rebate check, some analyses say.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates the tariff dividends could cost $600 billion per year. The Budget Lab at Yale University puts the cost closer to $450 billion, assuming a one-time $2,000 per-person rebate with a $100,000 income limit.
Bessent has said the $2,000 dividend could come in “lots of forms” but emphasized in a recent interview that the president’s trade policy is less about generating tariff revenue and more about “rebalancing” by bringing jobs back to the U.S.
“The revenue occurs early on and then as we rebalance, and the jobs come home, then it becomes domestic tax revenue,” Bessent told George Stephanopoulos earlier this month.
A recent poll Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos found that 65% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of tariffs, and 62% disapprove of his handling of the economy.
Annual inflation ticked up to 3% in September, though consumer prices haven’t accelerated as much as many feared when the president unveiled his sweeping tariffs last spring.
Still, frustration over high grocery prices has pushed Trump to slash tariffs on a range of products, including coffee, tea, beef and bananas.
It’s also possible the U.S. Supreme Court could limit the president’s tariff authority — a ruling that would severely undermine any rebate plan.