Republicans Don’t Merely Promise Policies Anymore. They Promise Cash — Courtesy of “The National Bank of Trump”

Opinion 

October 4, 2026

BY YIANNIS DAMELLOS

Mars Strangelove Jr. contributed to this story

The United States of Broken Promises is starting to look like a developing economy in the Balkans. Trump just offered $90 for Medicare, $500 for some folks, $1,776 for troops only, and $5,000 for everyone if his party takes the House and Senate in the midterms. But what Americans really need is a system that doesn’t require an election trick to make life affordable — and a social program that makes relief checks unnecessary. Only Bernie can deliver that.

There is something revealing about the way Republicans are increasingly handing people money, especially after Trump entered the White House. Trump has just announced a one-time $90 payment to more than 20 million Medicare Part B enrollees, supposedly to help offset their premiums. The money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a federal fund created in 2008. It is not money from Trump, and it is not a permanent Medicare benefit. It is a government payment arriving in October, just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

The numbers are almost more revealing than the politics. The standard Medicare Part B premium for 2026 is $202.90 a month. So the much-publicized $90 payment covers less than half of one month's premium. Meanwhile, Medicare remains a system in which Americans continue to pay premiums and out-of-pocket costs for a program that was designed precisely to provide health security in old age. And more than half of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage are not receiving this particular payment. What remains is a cluster of the emerging election-season cash machine.

And Trump's $90 payment is only one piece of it. His administration has also promised $500 Affordable Care Act rebate checks to roughly 1 million people in 30 states. And Trump has proposed a much larger prize: $5,000 for every American adult if Republicans retain control of both the House and Senate. That proposal would cost more than $1 trillion, according to the Associated Press, and would require congressional approval.

This is not an entirely new American tradition. Presidents have long used tax cuts, rebates and economic relief as political currency, and direct government payments are older than Trump. During the COVID-19 crisis, the federal government sent hundreds of millions of checks and other direct payments to Americans under legislation signed by both Trump and Biden. The Government Accountability Office estimates that the three pandemic rounds of Economic Impact Payments totaled $931 billion between April 2020 and December 2021.

Even the idea of a government guaranteeing a basic income has a surprisingly bipartisan history. Richard Nixon proposed his Family Assistance Plan in 1969, envisioning federal income supplements for poor families with children. A version passed the House in 1970 and again in 1971 but died in the Senate. The debate eventually helped shape later programs including Supplemental Security Income and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In other words, the American argument over whether government should put money directly into people's hands is hardly new.

But there is a fundamental difference between relief and real social change. A check can help someone pay this month's bill. It does not make the bill disappear next month. That distinction sits at the heart of the democratic-socialist critique of the American economic model. Why send Americans a small check to help them pay for health care instead of building a health care system in which they don't have to fear the bill in the first place?

Bernie Sanders and other supporters of Medicare for All argue that health care should be treated as a universal public guarantee rather than a recurring financial emergency, with the system financed through progressive taxation rather than premiums, deductibles, and other costs imposed on families. Sanders' current billionaire-tax proposal makes the same philosophical argument from the other direction: tax a small concentration of extreme wealth and use the revenue for health care, housing, child care and other public needs.

And that raises the bigger question. What if Americans stopped asking which politician was going to send them the next check and started asking why the richest country on Earth keeps making ordinary people wait for one? Governments don't merely promise policies anymore. They increasingly promise cash. But a government that builds universal health care, affordable housing, decent schools, and economic security does something rather different: it doesn't have to buy temporary relief with a check every time an election approaches. It makes security a permanent right. The check is then no longer the policy. The policy is the society that made the check unnecessary.