The Trump Accounts app launched this morning. Did you download it?
The actual accounts go live on July 4th as part of Trump’s 250th Birthday bonanza.
They’re $1,000 government-seeded investment accounts for every child born in the US between 2025 and 2028.
They’re locked into S&P 500 index funds until the kid turns 18 and then they’ll be converted to a traditional IRA with a 10% early withdrawal penalty until age 59½. Parents can add up to $5,000 a year on top.
The appeal of this is real.
A thousand dollars invested in the stock market for 18 years with tax-deferred growth is not nothing, and the program is getting a lot of enthusiastic coverage. But Bastiat's question applies here the same way it applies everywhere: we see the $1,000. What don't we see?
First of all, the government has no money of its own, so every dollar it seeds into a child's account is either taxed from someone or borrowed. That means that the national debt today's children will eventually help repay just got a little bigger.
Of course most people won’t think about that because the gift and the bill arrive in different envelopes.
FDR built Social Security in the 1930s, and his advisor Luther Gulick later wrote down something he claims FDR told him directly:
"Those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions... With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program."
The ownership language was intentional.
Not because the money actually sat in an account with a person’s name on it—it never did—but because calling it an “account” creates the kind of psychological ownership that makes a program politically untouchable for generations.
I think Trump is doing something similar here.
And of course this program is also named after him.
(What is it with this guy?!)
Anyway, I'm not saying it's necessarily a terrible program. I know the government does far worse with our money. I don’t really know how this will end up, but what I do know is that a government with a financial relationship to every American child from birth is a different kind of government than the one the Founders built.
I wish more people thought that mattered.
The government wants to give your kids $1,000 in an account they can't touch for decades.
We want to give them something far more likely to bring them prosperity, and success—an actual understanding of how money works, what governments do with it, and what to ask when someone hands you something and calls it free.
That understanding is what the Tuttle Twins books are built for, and it's something no government program can seed on anyone’s behalf.
The Memorial Day Sale ends soon and gives you up to 68% off our best-loved bundle.
Grab this deal before it’s gone!
Your kids will thank you.
— Connor
