Shury's Share: the Trump Accounts
Updated: 4 days ago
From Shury: On the 4th of July, its 250th birthday, America gave every child a stake in its own economy. Washington seeded it; the money that followed came by choice, not by compulsion.
A thousand dollars from the Treasury, seeded into a private account for every child born between 2025 and 2028, required by law to sit in a low-cost index fund tracking the broad market. Around seven million accounts have been opened since July. Behind them, private money at a scale no programme anticipated. Michael and Susan Dell have pledged $6.25 billion to put $250 into the accounts of 25 million children born before the cut-off. Ray Dalio has added $75 million for 300,000 children in Connecticut. More than fifty companies are matching contributions for employees' children. Families can add up to $5,000 a year from any source. At eighteen, this belongs to the child.
Milton Friedman's framework has never been improved on. You can spend your own money on yourself, your own on someone else, someone else's on yourself, or someone else's on someone else, and only the first is done with real care. Most social programmes are the fourth category by design: one group's money, spent by a second group, toward a third group's objectives. An owned account sidesteps the problem, nobody is deciding what the child needs. There is only a compounding asset belonging to the child.
That is what ownership offers that a transfer cannot. A subsidy is consumed and gone. An asset persists, grows with the economy that produced it, and can be handed on.
The founding prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew understood this and he moved Singaporeans out of rented flats and into owned ones from the mid-1960s. His reasoning was never mainly economic. He wanted every family whose sons would serve military service to hold something worth defending, so the young man knew exactly what he was protecting. Singapore's home ownership rate now sits at ~90%.
A person with a stake in a country behaves differently from a person with a claim on it. Ownership is what turns a recipient into a participant.
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