Breitbart Business Digest: Dividends, Coins, and 9/11

The 9/11 Coin

The Weekly Wrap: 9/11, Bessent, Biden, and Coins of the Realm

Welcome back to Friday. It is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is also the day CPI apparently locked in a rate hike from the Federal Reserve.

This was a busy four-day week. Breitbart interviewed the Treasury Secretary in Washington, DC. The Republicans held a midterm convention in Texas. President Trump promised us each $5,000 in exchange for re-electing Republican majorities. Hunter Biden launched a memecoin that immediately crashed. Consumer sentiment plunged, especially among Republicans. Core inflation came in hotter than expected, probably sealing the deal for a rate hike next week.

Let’s go.

The U.S. Mint is commemorating the lives lost from the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on 9/11 with a new half-dollar coin displaying the date of the travesty encircled by the phrase “NEVER FORGET.”

That seems a fitting tribute for the 25th anniversary of the attacks. It also is an important reminder that it is not a quarter. One of the problems the U.S. has had historically with half-dollars and full-dollar coins is that consumers tend to mix them up with quarters. We suppose that if you have a 9/11 coin, you aren’t likely to forget that it isn’t a quarter.

“As we approach the 25th anniversary of September 11, we honor the memory of those we lost and the courage of those who risked their lives to save their fellow Americans,” said Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. “A quarter century later, our promise to the victims and their families remains the same: we will never forget.”

The Hunter Biden Meme Coin Launches, Crashes

The 9/11 coin isn’t the only coin in the news this week. Hunter Biden this week launched a memcoin called $LAPTOP. Get it? Because it was his laptop “from Hell” that revealed so much of the corruption of the Biden crime family and Biden’s administration. And, also, it revealed the tight control the Democratic Party had obtained over social media when Twitter shutdown the New York Post’s account for reporting about the laptop—and then barred anyone else from even discussing the laptop or even the ban on discussing the laptop.

“The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery,” Hunter wrote on X.com, the name of Twitter in its post-totalitarian era under Elon Musk’s leadership.

The coin itself was not resilient. It lost 95 percent of its value within a few hours after launching it.

And, by the way, the laptop wasn’t a symbol anyone used to try to end Hunter. It was a real laptop, not a symbolic one. And no one cared all that much about what it told us about Hunter—we knew enough already—but what it told us about the Biden circles more broadly.

President Trump Promises a $5,000 Dividend

For over a year now, we’ve been told by the best and brightest economists in the land that U.S. consumers pay the tariffs President Trump announced on Liberation Day. The more honest economists acknowledge that the tariffs are actually paid by importers, who are sometimes U.S. companies and sometimes U.S. outposts of foreign companies, but they typically go on to insist that these are somehow passed through to consumers.

Presumably, these economists were jumping with joy when President Trump took to the stage at the GOP midterm convention to announce a plan to refund the revenue from the tariffs in the form of a $5,000 per adult “dividend” if Republicans retain control of both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections. He’s just giving the money back to the people who supposedly ultimately paid for the tariffs, right?

Of course, the total cost of a universal $5,000 dividend is several times what the tariffs would take in during a given year. We’ve seen estimates of around $1.3 trillion for the dividend, versus around $300 billion for the current tariffs.

Surprisingly, however, a bunch of people started to complain that the dividends would be inflationary. This is a bit of a quandary. Somehow taking money from consumers through a tariff is inflationary but so is giving money back to the consumers. It’s almost as if the underlying principle is that whatever President Trump does will get called inflation.

The truth is that tariffs tend to be disinflationary because they are a tax. Government collecting money from the economy is disinflationary (although this effect is usually overwhelmed by the inflationary pressure of government then spending that money). If tariff’s are borne by foreign manufacturers, they push down prices. If they are borne by U.S. importers and retailers, they’ll tend to diminish economic activity. If they are borne by consumers, they squeeze consumer spending on non-tariffed products. So even though the dividend probably would be inflationary, all other things being equal, in the current economic environment it may simply offset the weight of tariffs and higher gasoline prices.

Scott Bessent Saves the World

Breitbart News held a policy event with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week. You can read about a million stories about our conversation with Bessent here.

We were going to pick our favorite moments from the interview, but all our children are our favorites. Especially notable, however, was Bessent comments on AI and China.

“Beating China—there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this. Like everything—a trillion-and-a-half dollar defense budget, the Iron Dome—if they were to pull ahead on this, then nothing else matters,” Bessent said.

Consumer Sentiment Crashes

Consumer sentiment fell in early September to one of the lowest levels since before Ronald Reagan was elected president. A big driver of the decline was a drop in sentiment among Republicans. This fell to its lowest level since November 2024, after which it rose on optimism about the Trump presidency. The decline in GOP sentiment was led by the decline in the outlook for the economy, which fell from a reading of 86.9 in August to 73.2 in September. That’s the worst reading since October 2024.

Our interpretation of this is that Republicans are very worried about the midterm elections and the effect that a potential Democrat majority in either of both houses of Congress might have on the economy.

BBD History: 9/11—The Day We Fought Back

In honor of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we thought we would resurrect something we wrote for the New York Sun many years ago. This was from the very first review published for the film United 93:

I have heard it said that the 21st century began on September 11, and I would go so far as to say it began on United Flight 93. When the passengers reach loved ones on air phones and learn for the first time that the hijacked planes are being turned into murder machines, something changes. “United 93” refuses to mythologize this moment, and the shift is subtle. “This is a suicide mission,” one of the passengers says. The next thing that happens needs no mythologizing at all — among a small group of men, this realization transforms their fear into resolve. They don’t intend to die, and they don’t intend to be used as fodder for the terrorists’ plan.

As we memorialize those whose lives were taken in the attack and those who gave their lives in the rescue operations, let us truly never forget those brave men who fought back on that terrible day.  September 11, 2001, was not just the day the terrorists attacked us. It was also the day we fought back and won.