Tim O’Brien: Trump’s Visa Gold Card Program at $5M a Pop Is a Pipe Dream, a ‘Kind of Fiscal Snake Oil’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
WITT: “Let that settle in. But yeah. Tim O’Brien. So Trump announced his plan to replace the foreign investors visa program with the Trump gold card. It is a $5 million payment to give wealthy foreigners a fast track to permanent residency and a path to citizenship. So let’s listen to Trump doing the math.”

Trump: “If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive people coming in or people that were going to make productive, they’ll be young, but they’re talented, like a talented athlete. That’s $50 trillion. That means our debt is totally paid off, and we have $15 trillion above that.”

WITT: “Okay. How realistic is Trump’s goal of selling 10 million gold cards at 5 million bucks a piece? And do you think it would bring in young, highly productive people? As he claims, though, he gave the, you know, example of an athlete, but nonetheless.”

O’BRIEN: “You know, programs like this aren’t unusual. Alex, a lot of western countries have them. The logic is that it brings in people who are highly skilled or have thick wallets. In either case, it allows them to contribute to the economy in an overt way that makes it worthwhile having them pay for these visas. So a couple of thoughts on that. One is working class migrants on mosques contribute a great deal to the U.S. economy on their own. Whether they pay for their visas or not, that has been the truth of the United States economy for at least two centuries. And secondly, the Trump Administration has about a $2 trillion shortfall between what they say they want to cut from government and what they actually can cut. And so far, most of the cost cutting that Trump has done through doge and Elon Musk and these, these layoffs have all been very performative. The only way you’re really going to get your arms around balancing the us budget is by going after big entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, va spending, and then there’s interest on the national debt. All of these things are not going to get solved by by simply trading visas at $5 million a pop. It’s a pipe dream. He is just selling this as a kind of fiscal snake oil, but it’s not going to achieve its goals.”