You may not have heard about this latest tax from Trump. That could be because he’s not going through Congress to get it. Also, this scam could get buried in the middle of his many other grifting schemes. Trump is starting a new special subscription service to his social media platform, Truth Social, where big investors will pay $100,000 a month for advance access to Trump posts that can move markets.

This means that the next time Trump posts that he will blow Iran off the map and sends oil prices soaring, the people who paid Trump’s fee will have the opportunity to buy oil futures before the jump. The same story applies on the way down, as when he posts that a deal with Iran’s leaders is imminent.

And the inside information goes well beyond oil prices. He may announce a big military contract with Lockheed or one of his sons’ companies, sending stock prices soaring. Or he could announce a big DEI investigation of Disney or some other Hollywood entertainment company, causing their stock to plummet.

There are an infinite number of ways that Trump Truth Social announcements can move markets. This subscription service allows rich investors around the country to get in on the action.

If it’s not clear how Trump’s scheme amounts to a tax on your 401(k), think more carefully. If Trump’s clients get the jump on a big rise in oil prices, that means that they get the money, not you. This is true even if, like the vast majority of small investors, you are not actively managing your funds.

The person who is managing whatever fund(s) you hold will pay the higher price for oil or stock or anything else the funds might buy because Trump’s accomplices got their first. The same applies on the way down. The fund will get less money because the Trump gang already sold the stock before your fund manager had the chance to do so.

At this point, we can’t know how much money is involved because we don’t know how many big investors are prepared to sign up for what is blatantly an insider trading scheme. But we can do some speculation.

First, we need to calculate how much money an investor would expect to make from a service where they are paying $1.2 million a year. Since this scheme would likely lead to civil and possibly criminal charges if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Justice Department ever gets taken over by honest people, it seems a very big payoff would be required.

Any person paying Trump for insider information would need to expect substantial legal bills, and also the possibility of being forced to leave the country or face prison time. (Ask Martha Stewart.) Let’s say the payoff has to be at least 20 to 1, which would mean they would need to earn $24 million a year for their Trump Truth Social subscription to make sense.

Then we need to speculate on how many people are prepared to sign up for Trump’s racket. We know Wall Street is a cesspool, but this level of open corruption is probably too sleazy even for most of the big traders. Still, there could be a 1,000 Trump-loving sewer dwellers who don’t mind being open about their thefts.

In that case, the Trump insiders would be siphoning off $24 billion a year from other investors in the market. That is not huge in the context of a $7.5 trillion budget, but it is larger than many things we have big fights over.

For example, the AIDS program for Africa, which saved tens of millions of lives, and Elon Musk eagerly fed into the wood chopper, cost $6 billion a year. That’s roughly a fourth of Trump’s 401(k) tax. The cost of extending the subsidies in the ACA exchanges, which Trump and the Republicans ended, would have been a bit higher at $27 billion a year.

So, 401(k) holders and other small investors are paying a considerable chunk of money through this “tax” to Trump and his enrolled insiders. As I said, this tax is not going to Congress for approval, but we can assume that all the Republicans in Congress approve of it. If not, Trump would be impeached for such a blatantly illegal scheme, but we know the Republican motto: “if Trump does, it’s good.”

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.