Offering citizens money to do something the nation needed done, an infamous economics paper found in 1997, only depressed people’s interest in doing it. In The Cost of Price Incentives: An Empirical Analysis of Motivation Crowding-Out, researchers investigated the willingness of Swiss communities to host a nuclear waste facility. Half of residents expressed support. When offered financial compensation for hosting it, however, support fell to a quarter. Increasing the amount of the offer had no effect.
The paper concluded that the best explanation for citizens’ initial willingness to host a potentially dangerous facility was simple public spiritedness—the civic impulse to consider the needs of the community, even at personal cost, in addition to self-interest. Putting a price on that public spiritedness cheapened and thus extinguished it. The risk in offering to pay for a thing, after all, is that it reveals what you think that thing is worth. Swiss citizens evidently did not appreciate having their public spiritedness assessed for its market value.
Fast-forward 30 years to September 2026, when President Trump promised to send a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans retain control of Congress in November:
If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic—tremendous economic success—in history, we’ve never had anything like what’s happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.
The idea has not been popular. An Axios/YouGov poll found that more likely voters oppose the idea than support it. Another poll found that almost 63% thought the proposal was inappropriate, versus 17% who deemed it appropriate. Even among Republicans, a plurality agreed: inappropriate. Like the Swiss, Americans don’t seem to appreciate having their votes priced on the market. As Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep put it to Republican pollster Frank Luntz: “I’m thinking about the market dynamics there. You offer somebody more money if they think it’s a bad deal. …What message does it send if the president is saying to America, ‘I will pay you $5,000 to something—to do something you previously did for free?’”
Citizens in a republic, it turns out, have a complicated relationship with the government giving out money.
In the long-running General Social Survey data, Americans consistently displayed concern that we are spending too much on “welfare.” Ask about “assistance to the poor,” however, and overwhelming majorities of Americans think we aren’t spending enough. Majorities of Americans don’t support UBI—unless it’s targeted by income level and legal eligibility. The Biden administration was mystified to find that unconditionally expanding the child tax credit did not guarantee the policy’s popularity, even with Democratic control of Congress. Old Guard Republicans were equally baffled when most self-identified very conservative voters said they wanted the federal government to do more to support working families with kids—a fact that Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith used to muscle an expanded child tax credit through the House of Representatives, over the objections of the backfooted Old Guard.
The results in each of these polls are multiply determined, like any poll result. But the story they—and all the many polls like them—tell together is clear enough: American voters don’t mind direct financial benefits at all, if they feel like those benefits are provided consonant with their values and common sense. But there are limits to that embrace, and they will reject proposals that violate those values—even if it might financially benefit them. The political salience of welfare-maximizing economic analysis is not infinite. Republics, like people, do not live by bread alone. Other things matter to voters too.
One of those things is the feeling that our public engagement matters, that our role as free citizens is valuable, that our fathers were right to buy it for us with blood. Presidents should try to find ways to save Americans money; if a policy results in savings to me, good! But trying to buy us off is another matter, and we can tell the difference. The Axios poll found that over 60% of respondents didn’t think the president would deliver on the promise in any case. It would not be, after all, the first time he has made such promises without keeping them.
And when those attempts multiply in apparent electoral desperation, as with the president’s October 2 promise to send $90 checks to 20 million seniors on Medicare, or when they invert and become threatening, as with his October 4 implication that he might be less inclined to help Ohio if Democrats win, then the game is given up.
This is why the offer of $5,000 for one’s vote feels wrong. It is insulting, in a way the public is traditionally more accustomed to hearing from Democrats. Democrats have complained for decades about “those” allegedly ignorant working people who insist on “voting against their own economic interests,” by which they mean voting against marginal increases in income in exchange for symbolic submission to an elite who, even in these very offers of largess, quite clearly disdain them. Americans tend to reject that deal, and are likely to keep on rejecting it, no matter who makes the offer. Our civic prerogatives, our freedom to decide who should lead us, and our judgment about what those leaders should do are worth more than a $5,000 check which most voters don’t think would be forthcoming anyway.
And if we start to feel like those things are not worth more than a one-time payoff, if our economic situation is dire enough that a check for our vote starts to feel like a good deal—as well it might for many Americans for whom the cost of living is still too high and wages are still too flat—then we are smart enough to ask ourselves: “Who led us to this dire state of affairs, and why would we keep them in power?”
Trump is a felonious liar whose word is worthless.
Well, Trump used to be a registered Democrat. It explains why he thinks giving handouts is good politics.
He also forgot that if a Democrat POTUS had come up with this idea, the prestige media would be all over it branding it as a fantastic idea for the people... but the TDS agenda requires that the same media laugh at it, trash it and denigrate it as it comes from Trump's head.
The bigger positive move of Trump was the Trump accounts. The media is ignoring that and yet it is maybe the biggest help to American citizens that the federal government has done since Republicans defeated slavery and passed the civil rights act.