A president often gives their annual handle day to fall in and saves the State of the Union address for the next month, when they are constitutionally obliged to make some report to Congress. President Donald Trump went a different way with his March 4 address, which was billed as a mutual address to Congress.
” America is back”, Trump declared to a group of joyously happy Republican lawmakers and sneering Democrat House members and lawmakers, a little over six months after the start of his following, nonconsecutive presidential term.
” Six weeks ago, I stood beneath the roof of this Capitol and proclaimed the dawn of the Golden Age of America”, Trump said. And if the leader gets his way, portion of that novel Gilded Age will be something called golden cards.
Platinum cards are Trump’s lyric on so-called clean cards, which grant foreigners the right of continuous residency in the United States. These came up in his speech after Trump talked about the importance of achieving,” What has not been done in 24 years: balanc]ing ] the federal budget”.
That is a difficult target because the U. S. has fundamental shortfalls of about$ 2 trillion a year. When Trump won in 2024 after four years in the political wilderness, these imbalances were on a way to get worse, not much.
The interest only to support the$ 36 trillion and climbing federal loan came to about a trillion dollars yearly. And the rights shortage, with not enough people paying into Social Security and Medicare to keep them fluid in the long term, is worsening.
Things just get trickier for would-be budget configurations from it. Trump wants to lock in the tax breaks from his first name and enhance them with carveouts quite as no more tax of ideas. A Republican-controlled Congress did decide this issue and is likely to reduce some more income in the process.
One phrase of Republicans has been that duty breaks pay for themselves. This can be correct when a duty is so great that the economic errors it produces are called “deadweight loss”. When something is taxed at a 90 % rate, it might be possible to reduce the rate to 25 %, say, and still make more tax revenues on it because of increased demand and production.
Some economists think that Trump’s taxes reduce lock-ins or additional carve-outs could unleash for market forces. Though some give that broad regulatory transformation that the management is also pursuing could have some expansionary effects and that increased growth was finally swell treasury receipts. ( But don’t get them started on the effects of Trump’s tariffs. )
Trump has likewise ruled out structural changes in Social Security and Medicare payments, such as a raised retirement age or more co-pays. That could be a pleasure to elders who are on fixed incomes, but these rights initiatives are driving imbalances and thus putting America’s long-term credit rating in jeopardy.
What does that leave to close the roughly$ 2 trillion space? Very little of that is likely to occur from security breaks. The whole discretionary funds is about$ 2 trillion, and yet Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and head of the Department of Government Performance, conceded that the state would have to continue doing some points.
Gold card, golden goose?
Trump thinks some of that revenue will come from gold cards.
” With that goal]of balancing the budget ] in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card, which goes on sale very, very soon”, Trump told Congress. ” For$ 5 million, we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U. S. citizenship”.
He added,” While we take out the criminals, killers, traffickers and child predators who]were ] allowed to enter our country” under the relaxed border regime of his predecessor,” we will now bring in brilliant, hardworking job-creating people. They’re going to pay a lot of money, and we’re going to reduce our debt with that money”.
Even at$ 5 million a pop, it would take a large influx of moneyed foreigners to make a dent in the deficit. If 100, 000 would-be immigrants were willing to spring for it in the next year, that could come to$ 500 billion, or one-quarter of the budget deficit that the Trump administration is trying to eliminate.
A UBS report for 2023 had total global millionaires at about 58 million people. People with assets of$ 5 million or more were a much smaller group, and almost 22 million millionaires or higher were already in the U. S. So America would have to convince a relatively small pool of already highly mobile people to take up residence here and pay a premium for that privilege.
Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, doesn’t think it will fly.
” Trump’s proposal isn’t well thought out”, he told the Washington Examiner. ” The price is too high, it replaces another green card category entirely, and few will use it”.
Nowrasteh reckons that “fewer than 10 gold cards will be sold a year” at the$ 5 million price point.
Nowrasteh added,” Many countries sell visas, but it’s not a major source of revenue: the price is just a way to select rich migrants”.
When asked about a million-dollar price point, his estimate didn’t change much.
” More would be sold”, he admitted,” but not many more”.
The gold card would take the place of a current visa, the EB-5. Under that regime, “migrants have to invest about$ 1.8 million in the U. S. to get a green card. But that’s an investment, not a payment for a green card”, he said.
The think tank vice president did think, however, that a lower market clearing price could work wonders.
” At$ 20, 000-$ 100, 000, the government could sell millions of them and undermine human smugglers at the same time”, he said. At$ 50, 000 per, say, the sale of 2 million such cards would generate$ 100 billion in revenue for deficit reduction.
How will it work, or will it?
The details of the gold card are still being worked out, but Trump sketched what it would mean for cardholders in broad outline in his address.
” It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated”, Trump said to Congress. ” And these people will have to pay tax in our country. They won’t have to pay tax from where they came, the money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that. But they have to pay tax, create jobs”.
Either as part of gold cards or a closely related proposal, Trump said,” They’ll also be taking people out of colleges and paying for them so that we can keep them in our country, instead of having them being forced out” upon graduation.
Ryan James Girdusky is a writer and host of the iHeartRadio program A Numbers Game who is often sympathetic to Trump. But not on in this case. He cited a frequent Trump political foil, former President Joe Biden.
Gidursky called it “one of the dumbest f—–g ideas to come out of a White House since Biden thought it be a great idea to leave billions of military equipment in Afghanistan”.
The plan, in Girdusky’s estimation, is to “gain trillions of dollars by selling a fast track to American citizenship to ‘ global citizens,'” which he objected to strenuously, adding,” Anyone who uses the term ‘ global citizen ‘ while sitting in the Oval Office should be tried for treason”.
He doesn’t like gold cards because of the possible political effects and because they are, in his telling, a way of not dealing with the larger problem.
” If they pay off$ 5 trillion and grant enough green cards and citizenship to flip a presidential election, all the money raised will be wiped away by new deficit spending”, he warned.
AL GREEN REMOVED FROM HOUSE CHAMBER AFTER PROTESTING TRUMP ADDRESS
Girdusky added that the gold card proposal “doesn’t wipe away bad spending, doesn’t end bad immigration practices, and doesn’t necessarily grow the economy”. Rather, it is “gold plated s–t sold]to] the American people with the promise it’ll be a running success”.
Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.
