On July 6, Trump rang the stock market’s opening bell from the Oval Office while children sat on the rug and Ted Cruz told them they now own McDonald’s and Boeing. This is what the Trump accounts actually are, underneath the ceremony: a locked retirement account for people who won’t retire until roughly 2085, seeded with $1,000 of public money, taxed on the way out more heavily than if the government had done nothing, and engineered, by the sponsors’ own admission, to make a child feel ownership in place of actually having any.
I walk through the pitch and the program side by side: what Cruz and Trump promised in the room, and what the statute says. Why financial planners across the spectrum, including the Cato Institute, say don’t put your own money in. Why “you own McDonald’s” is a feeling the app is built to produce, not a fact about the child’s relationship to McDonald’s. And how the whole apparatus — public seed money routed into the largest firms, the only named alternative being “communists who want to destroy the country” — fits the Lords and Serfs pattern this series has been tracking: the toll here isn’t collected at a chokepoint. It’s collected as consent, taught from birth.
You may not get a safety net. You may not get a livable climate. But someday, walking into McDonald’s, they want you to look around and say I own this place.
