Politics sucks. A lot. It has sucked for a very long time, but right now it feels like we’ve entered an entirely new orbit of stupidity.
Before you roll your eyes and close the tab, this isn’t a plea to go vote, nor is it a defense of either geriatric party machine. It’s about how both sides have completely detached from arithmetic and basic reality—and how that delusion is quietly screwing every single person who runs a business, pays a mortgage, or buys groceries.
I grew up in a tiny Midwest town. Religious family, small-business household. In that world, being a staunch Republican wasn’t a decision as much as it is just the obvious. Everyone thought that way. And because I’ve always believed that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, my teenage summers spent cutting grass weren’t soundtracked by grunge or hip-hop—they were spent listening to the furious baritone of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy on a Sony Walkman.
Looking back, that kid feels like a completely different human being. Not necessarily because of the politics (though definitely because of the politics), but because political punditry and the cult of personality that goes with it have become the biggest threat to our country.
Today, I’m an older white guy running a small business, and politically, I land somewhere left of center. But make no mistake: if you are a card-carrying partisan on either side of the aisle, I hate your politics. And you probably hate mine. That’s the modern American condition: Agree with me completely, or you’re an idiot.
Back when I was that indoctrinated kid mowing lawns, the Republican platform at least pretended to care about three principles: dignity, self-reliance, and fiscal conservatism. Those are values I still believe in. But as I’ve watched over the past couple decades, that version of the GOP effectively died with John McCain. The few remaining holdouts who actually care about balance sheets and institutional norms have been laughed out of the room and branded as RINOs. Now you can be morally reprehensible, kleptocratic, and spend like a drunken sailor so long as it destroys “the enemy within”—or as they used to be known, Americans.
Which brings us to the latest circus act.
This week, President Trump announced that if Republicans hold the House and Senate this November, every adult citizen will receive a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” check.
Let’s set aside the fact that a president promising cash payments contingent on winning an election sounds uncomfortably like flat-out bribery, or that executing it without Congress is dead on arrival. We all know it’s hot air. This is from the same whiteboard of promises that gave us “ending the Ukraine war on day one,” “DOGE savings dividends,” and “tariff rebate checks.” If you genuinely believe a $5,000 check is hitting your mailbox this winter, I am happy to let you know the Easter Bunny has gone into real estate and has a fantastic portfolio of oceanfront property in Kansas he’d love to pitch you.
The real scandal isn’t the promise itself. It’s the silence of the people who used to preach fiscal prudence.
Can you imagine the apocalyptic outrage if a Democrat stood at a podium and proposed dropping $1.2 trillion out of a helicopter? Just weeks after the U.S. national debt officially crossed $40 trillion and our annual debt interest payments topped $1 trillion? Cable news heads would be detonating in real time. We’d be subjected to four straight weeks of lectures on Weimar Germany and the decay of Western civilization.
Here is the math I have yet to hear a single Republican point out:
A $5,000 check to roughly 245 million adult citizens costs $1.2 trillion.
That single payout exceeds all three rounds of CARES Act and COVID stimulus checks combined.
That pandemic surge in money supply is the exact reason the Fed has spent the last five years playing whack-a-mole with stubborn inflation.
The federal government is already running a rolling deficit near $1.8 trillion, and annual net interest on our national debt now tops $1 trillion—costing us more each year than our entire national defense budget.
Yet there’s Trump, demanding the Fed aggressively slash interest rates while simultaneously floating a plan to pour 1.2 trillion gallons of kerosene directly onto the inflationary fire—a molotov cocktail of fiscal stupidity that would immediately jump our inflation rate back into double digits.
Where are the fiscal conservatives to point this out? They’re cowering in the corner, terrified of being targeted by the MAGA base for disagreeing with Dear Leader.
Driving out to Colorado this week, I listened to business-news talking heads who clearly lean right twisting themselves into pretzels. One analyst sheepishly muttered, “Well, I just wish he had phrased it as: ‘You’ll be better off financially under Republican policies.’”
Well, he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything close to that. He said he wanted to print cash and mail it out to buy your vote. Or pay for it with tariffs, which under even the most optimistic projections might bring in $300 billion per year. Since tariffs are essentially a sales tax paid by domestic consumers, that’s a bit like me lifting your wallet so I can generously hand you back your own cash. He proposed an inflationary sugar rush right in the middle of a compounding affordability crisis.
Of course, Democrats can’t mount an effective critique of this insanity because their party has its own economic blind spots the size of a billboard. When the only energy on your flank comes from folks arguing that we can fund universal basic income and single-payer healthcare simply by magically finding a way to tax the rich and printing whatever difference remains, you lose the moral high ground on fiscal responsibility.
I stick to financial media precisely because its bias is obvious: it cares about capital and returns. I can adjust for that back to reality. But explaining how reckless deficits push up Treasury yields, spike mortgage rates, and keep everyday prices high apparently requires too many syllables for modern campaign rallies. Both sides have realized that pandering to the lowest common denominator is a lot easier than delivering bad news.
The end result? The thinking middle has been entirely evicted. We don’t have a seat at the table.
If you’re on the right, you either bow to the populist gospel or you get ostracized. If you’re on the left, you face the gauntlet that comedian Neal Brennan nailed years ago: tell another Democrat you’re on their team, and they look at you suspiciously and say, “We’ll see.” The moment you suggest that free-market capitalism is the primary reason this country went from thirteen backwater colonies to the richest empire on earth in two centuries, you’re viewed as a traitor to the cause.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably stuck in that thinking middle with me. Or you’re rage-reading this, eager to hit reply and tell me why your chosen faction is actually the savior of civilization.
Before you do, ask yourself one question: When was the last time you called out absolute stupidity on your own team?
Because if we only demand fiscal sanity and truth when the other guy is in the room, nobody is actually minding the store. And the math will always collect its tab in the end.
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