President Trump on Wednesday promised to issue a $5,000 “dividend” to every American adult if the Republicans retained majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in this November’s mid term elections. Trump said the payment would be “very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

There is so much wrong with this statement that it is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with the fact that this is nothing like a successful company making a cash distribution to its shareholders. The shareholders of a private sector company voluntarily buy its stock and can sell it (no longer own or have anything to do with the company) any time they want. And a successful company funds its distributions from the profits earned when its customers voluntarily pay the company more for its products that it cost the company to provide them.

The government represents the antithesis of this of this scenario in every regard. Neither its “shareholders” nor its customers act voluntarily. They are, in fact, the same people and they purchase the government’s products (pay taxes) under the threat of fine or imprisonment if they don’t. Should they resist adamantly enough, armed men will come to drag them away and kill them if they resist that.

This is why the hoary Republican promise of electing a businessman to “run the government like a business” has always been nonsensical.

But even if one accepts the analogy for the moment, there is a further problem with Trump’s reasoning. The “company” isn’t successful. Its “sales” aren’t remotely exceeding its costs and haven’t during any year in this century. The federal government is projected to spend $7.4 trillion in FY2026 while only collecting $5.6 trillion in taxes. As a going concern, it is losing money. There are no “profits” to distribute.

This is transparent vote buying, practiced to some extent by every politician, but on a scale not seen since the president Trump often invokes as almost as “great” as himself: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In many respects, Trump is Roosevelt, without the cigarette holder and snooty accent.

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Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and host of the Tom Mullen Talks Freedom podcast.