In President Donald Trump's idealized framing, the United States was at its zenith in the 1890s. The Republican has said repeatedly, "We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country." Trump points to decades after the Civil War, when the federal government ran frequent budget surpluses. Tariffs were then the government's main source of revenue and were high. But economists and historians say most of the era's growth was due to factors like the country's booming population, advances in technology and expansion of territory, which gave it new natural resources to exploit. They also say tariffs didn't play as large a role as Trump suggests.

An idea first proposed on social media has bubbled up to the White House and received President Donald Trump's enthusiastic endorsement: Take some of the savings from billionaire Elon Musk's drive to cut government spending and return it to taxpayers. If Musk's target of $2 trillion in spending cuts is achieved by next year, supporters of the idea say that about one-fifth of those funds could be distributed to taxpaying households in checks of about $5,000. But before you start planning for a windfall, budget experts say such huge savings — nearly one-third of the federal government's annual spending — are highly unlikely.