Nov. 19, 2025, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government Executive Director Robert Romano today issued the following statement in response to President Donald Trump’s proposal for $2,000 checks for low and middle income households using tariff revenue:
“The $412.9 billion of checks that were sent out in 2020 on a bipartisan basis during Covid were designed to be inflationary, because they were occurring at a thankfully in hindsight brief moment of deflation. Oil had dropped to below-zero dollars per barrel as demand collapsed, global production was on its back amid the economic lockdowns and in the U.S., 25 million Americans temporarily lost their jobs in the blink of an eye. But for that bipartisan intervention by Congress and President Trump, including the relief sent to small businesses, and it is entirely possible the U.S. would have found itself in a depression that lasted much longer. Instead, it was a very steep but short-lived recession.
“That said, if the $412.9 billion of checks to households on a bipartisan basis in 2020 were questionable, then the $401.5 billion by then-President Biden and the Democratic Congress on a singularly partisan basis in 2021 was inexcusable, throwing fuel on the fire at a time when the economy was already fully recovering. A part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan, Democrats in Congress thought deflation was still a threat, and so those checks too were designed to be inflationary, and boy were they as demand came back rapidly while global supplies were still on their pandemic footing. By June 2021, inflation was up to 5.4 percent. By December 2021, inflation was up to 7 percent before peaking at 9.1 percent in June 2022. The checks and all of the other interventions over those two years played a substantial role in increasing the money supply by $6.3 trillion from February 2020 to March 2022, most of which occurred by January 2021.
“We’ll never know the counterfactual of what might have happened had there been no more checks in 2021. What’s important is the checks were sent out, and four years later, the American people are still paying for them.
“Today, there is no deflationary threat, although we might be in a prolonged slowdown with unemployment up 1.6 million since Jan. 2023. This is certainly not the economic emergency seen in 2020, and if anything, we are still experiencing the disinflation from the last spending and borrowing binge. As it is, with the deficit clocking in at $1.77 trillion in 2025 and inflation still cooling, we need another round of $2,000 checks like we need a hole in the head. They might not be intended to be inflationary but that wouldn’t change the likelihood that they will be inflationary. We might be better off burning $1 trillion or so in a bonfire to reduce the money supply but my second choice is try to balance the budget, boost production to increase supplies and cut prices, and to boost wages.”
For media availability contact Americans for Limited Government at media@limitgov.org.
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