The DOGE "Dividend" is Bullshit

Although misguided and misnamed, the DOGE Dividend does serve a compelling purpose.

by Jeremy Novak

Recently, MAGA found itself in the awkward position of espousing a general redistribution of wealth, otherwise known as “socialism”:

This idea of a “DOGE Dividend” has been spreading around MAGA influencer circles like wildfire. A payment from the government to each and every taxpayer! Sounds great, doesn’t it?

The source of the payments would be the savings that Elon Musk and DOGE (the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”) has apparently scraped off of the sides of the barrels of government benefit expenditures:

I don’t want to get into the weeds on the numbers because I don’t really trust the data that’s coming out of DOGE. Economists like Justin Wolfers have been doing the math and explaining, to the surprise of no one, that the numbers don’t add up.

I am more interested in the propagandistic nature of this grand idea.

For starters, it’s notable that this has come out now, just as the unpopularity of Elon Musk and his efforts to slice and dice the treasury has been gaining momentum. What’s a great way to turn around your fortunes if you’re a disliked avid government program slayer? Promise a large check to everyone, of course!

But this “dividend” idea is being pushed with Orwellian overtones. It’s not something that achieves the purported goals of DOGE and is named something other than what it actually is.

Is it actually a “dividend”?

It’s quite a stretch, if not an outright falsehood, to call this a “dividend”. A dividend is a recurring payment that results from being invested into something, such as a company’s stock. Some companies reward stockholders with payments, called “dividends”, that are paid out regularly every quarter.

It’s true that technically a “dividend” does not have to automatically be a recurring payment. It could be a one-time payment. In a general sense, it’s any kind of payoff that results from an investment, or from an effort of some kind that’s put into something.

But in practice, people expect dividends to be recurring—an ongoing reward for continued investment; or for sticking with a project and seeing it come to fruition.

Is the DOGE Dividend an ongoing or recurring reward? No, it’s just a payment. Just like when the government sent out checks during Covid. The difference is those Covid checks were sent out during an apocalyptic crisis. The DOGE Dividend would be sent out for…..well, we don’t really know the reason. The DOGE Dividend doesn’t appear to accomplish what DOGE’s mainly set out to do. Which gets us to the next propagandistic element….

Will this help fix the deficit?

Elon Musk is extremely concerned about the deficit. According to him, it is the cause of many things wrong in society; and many things good hinge on it being under control.

The deficit is what occurs when you pay out more than you take in. Pretty much every year for decades, with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990’s the government spent more than it collected. This means they took on debt to pay all the bills. This debt indeed has accumulated to a disturbing degree, which is an important political issue in its own right and a topic for another article.

DOGE’s main priority, according to its founder, is to curb the yearly deficit, and to do so via finding savings in the massive government bureaucracy. So, it’s curious that paying out a “dividend” would even be a serious proposal, because it would do nothing to reduce the deficit.

If the goal is to reduce the deficit, savings should be redirected to underfunded areas, not handed out as a one-time check. A government payout—no matter the branding—does nothing to fix the long-term imbalance Musk claims to care about

Just giving the savings away, even if it’s back to the taxpayers, is not taking advantage of the savings. You’re just spending the money on something other than your original budget, so you are maintaining the deficit.

So, no, the DOGE “dividend” doesn’t in any way help with deficits. In fact, it keeps the deficit in place. If you believe—as Elon Musk says he does—that the worst thing in society is government deficits, then this dividend plan is pure madness. Unless….

The actual purpose of the DOGE dividend

The DOGE Dividend actually could help to achieve some of the goals of DOGE, but it’s just badly misnamed.

Much like being fired from a company, through DOGE’s work we are essentially being fired from the government as we know it, where we’ve agreed to pay into a system and thus get reliable benefits from that system.

And much like an employer’s severance package paid out to laid off employees is somewhat of a consolation benefit, taxpayers are getting a lump-sum payment for their acceptance of fewer benefits.

The consolation prize is a hefty DOGE severance check.

The name should be changed to the DOGE “Severance”.

Musk and his ilk have made it known they want to cut and slash government spending and haven’t been shy about including popular benefit programs like Social Security and Medicaid in their targets. This is proving very unpopular. Opinion polls and angry constituents at elected officials’ town halls are reflecting this. One way to make it tolerable, at least in the short term, is to issue checks.

Dear taxpayers: Thank you for your service.

Here's a check.

Don’t spend it all in one place.

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The Case for Trump as a Russian Asset

The media won't touch this story even though the evidence is mounting.

by Ben Cohen

Last Friday, the Daily Beast published a bombshell story alleging that Donald Trump had been recruited as a KGB asset in 1987 under the codename "Krasnov." The report cited a Facebook post by former Soviet intelligence officer Alnur Mussayev.

The story was then scrubbed from the site the following day with no retraction or acknowledgment that the story had ever been published:

The article was authored by Isabel Van Brugen, a Newsweek reporter specializing in Russia and Ukraine, but she has not acknowledged the piece on her social media. Mainstream outlets haven’t touched the story either and Google and X searches yield very little outside of fringe publications.

There are a number of questions worth asking about this story, the primary being whether it is legitimate. And if it is legitimate, why is the media refusing to cover it?…

This is an excerpt from today’s Members Only post. To continue reading, get 50% off a Banter Membership and go here:

The Case for Trump as a Russian Asset