The Trump administration mailed $500 checks to people who lost their Obamacare subsidies. The checks arrived weeks before the midterm elections. This is what political scientists call a coincidence and what everyone else calls Tuesday.
Five hundred dollars. Not four-ninety-nine. Not five-oh-one. Someone ran the numbers and decided that amount would make people forget their premiums went up by thousands. That person got promoted.
Millions of Americans lost their subsidies because the administration cut them. Then the same administration sent them five hundred dollars as a refund for the thing they no longer have. It's like your landlord evicting you then mailing you a Starbucks gift card. Except the gift card is also your money.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started scanning for ticker symbols. They found none. Then they Googled "how to invest in government checks." Then they bought calls on health insurance companies that would benefit from subsidy cuts. Then they lost everything because they were three news cycles behind institutional desks that shorted this trade in June.
The timing was flawless. People received free money right before voting. The fact that it was their own money redistributed back to them after a policy change that hurt them did not appear on the check. Checks famously do not include footnotes explaining irony.
Some guy in Ohio got his five hundred dollars and thought the president personally approved it. He was correct in the sense that all federal spending requires executive branch authorization. He was incorrect in every other sense a human can be incorrect.
The refunds targeted swing states with surgical precision. This was also a coincidence. America runs on coincidences timed perfectly to election cycles.
Chart nerds tried to find support levels for vote-buying and gave up when they realized purchasing power of $500 has no Fibonacci retracement.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
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