They seize wealth from us

Trump accounts are now mandatory for all children born after 1/1/25. They were briefly optional and you chose if you wanted them while filing taxes

Trump accounts give the kid $1000 no strings attached and it’s loaded into an index (SPYM) made up of nvidia, apple, amazon, Microsoft, meta, tesla, micron, and alphabet class a (google).

On a surface read this is great, trump is giving free money to children for education planning.

But realistically it’s money laundering to fund their pump and dump. About 3.6-3.7 million children are born in the USA each year over the past few years (declining from a 2007 peak of 4.1). About 9% of those are undocumented, leaving about 3.25-3.3 million. This money isn’t free and doesn’t come from nowhere, it’s about 3.3 billion dollars of taxpayer money (yearly) to pump directly into AI companies and other grossly overvalued tech that’s propped up by making the overwhelming majority of retirement accounts contingent on its value (eg tesla)

In a typical 529 you have much more say in how investments are spread (with notable limitations) but the trump account is spym only.

Further, while 3.3 billion is barely anything in the scheme of the economy or even openais apparent (bloated) value, it’s to prime the pump to get more working class dollars in these companies. The 529 your child is given is essentially worthless if you make no contributions (at least in the context of education). Even maxing yearly contributions (5k/yr) from 0-18 with a prediction based on somewhat idealized returns would make the account worth ~$170,000 at 18, which is often not nearly enough to pay for college now, let alone in almost 2 decades. But it means a decent portion of Americans with children are pumping more of their cash into this bubble for their children’s education.

This is not even touching on the other gross things, like robinhood being the default and only servicer of these plans, which almost certainly is because of a fat bribe as they are the scummiest brokerage that preys on wallstreetbets gambler type retail investors.

Despite this it’s better than sending another 3 billion dollars of bombs for Israel to do genocide with, I guess