Trump's $5,000 reward is funded by growth, not taxes, and Cruz says not to the unemployed.

…(cont) Turn the page, there's a third man — Senator Cruz, same day — and he's not comfortable with growth paying anybody who isn't working. He wants the check structured as a tax refund, for people who already pay in. A refund isn't a reward, and it isn't free of taxes either; a refund is your own money coming back to you. Three answers, one check: grown money, not-tax money, refunded tax money. I've read that page a few times trying to seat all three at the same table.

I went to the bank Thursday for something unrelated — a certified check for the man who does my fan belt. Three tellers working that day, and I asked, out of habit, where the funds for a certified check come from. Three tellers, three answers: one said the account, one said the bank's own funds, one said she'd have to check with somebody in back. Same bank, same afternoon, three different sources for the same kind of check. I paid the man and drove home, but I kept the number slip. It looked like my page.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board ran the number that same day — $1.2 trillion, they figured, across the country's adults — and "preposterous" was the word they used for the whole plan. I don't have a page anywhere that says what a trillion-dollar reward, funded by growth, actually draws against when the check clears.

I flipped back eight days, to September 3rd, where I'd copied down what the Washington Examiner's editor said on television — that the President is doing "too much," in his words, and that people are struggling with affordability. I don't know if that page connects to this one. I only know I filed them under the same tab, because that's how the notebook works — in the order I hear things, not the order they'd need to make sense.

One more line, and then I'll let you go. The Times ran a piece on the online people brought in special for the midterm convention, and it said they mostly worked around discussing the economy at all — "avoided," was their word. Same Thursday as the check, the growth, the not-tax money, and the refund.

Say — before you're out the door — the Senator's version gets paid for by taxes already collected, in advance, off the very people the Commerce Secretary says aren't paying for any of this at all. I don't know how those two pages sit together in one notebook. I only know what's written at the top of mine, from Thursday, in my own hand: reward.