Continued corruption in the current Trump administration and family. Blending of politics and family. The family continuing to take money from dark parts of the world. I’m tired of it all.
I have emailed my Senator, Chuck Grassely about many things and he always sends a blah vanilla response about how they’ll “keep my thoughts in mind”. I don’t know what else to do besides continue to highlight all the evil they are doing. Hopefully this is over soon.
I’m a constituent from Cedar Falls writing about ProPublica’s September 14 investigation — since confirmed in substance by the family itself — reporting that Umar Kremlev, a Russian businessman close to Vladimir Putin, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Donald Trump Jr.’s May wedding celebrations in the Bahamas. The payments reportedly ran through a Dubai entity affiliated with the International Boxing Association, which Kremlev leads and which has been financed by the Russian state energy company Gazprom.
Donald Trump Jr. and his wife have acknowledged the gift, describing Kremlev as a “dear friend.” Kremlev is under Ukrainian sanctions and was recently honored by Putin with the Order of Friendship.
Whatever the intent, a member of Putin’s inner circle spending a fortune to gain intimate access to the family of a sitting President — while this administration is brokering the Russia–Ukraine war and Jared Kushner helps lead those talks — raises serious counterintelligence and public-corruption questions. The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee has opened an inquiry, but the Justice Department has signaled it won’t investigate.
You have built a long record on government transparency and rooting out conflicts of interest. I’m asking you to:
– Publicly call for a full accounting of the payments and of Kremlev’s contacts with the Trump family;
– Support a counterintelligence review of the relationship; and
– Press the DOJ to explain its decision not to look into it.
Michael and Susan Dell just did something worth celebrating, and worth copying.
Through their foundation, they’ve committed $6.25 billion to drop $250 into investment accounts for up to 25 million American kids — children age 10 and under, born before January 1, 2025, with a Social Security number, living in ZIP codes where the median household income is $150,000 or less. The money goes into the new federal “Trump Accounts” (the Invest America program), which otherwise seed $1,000 for babies born from 2025 on. The Dells’ gift is aimed squarely at the kids who missed that window — the ones who’d otherwise start with nothing. Parents just have to open the account; the $250 lands automatically.
That’s the whole thing. No strings, no lecture, no means-tested paperwork maze. Open an account for your kid, and a stranger puts $250 in it. It’s one of the largest single acts of philanthropy ever aimed at ordinary American families, and it’s built on the one financial idea that actually works without fail: start early and let time do the work.
What “25 million” actually means — and why the design is clever
It’s worth clearing up what that 25 million number is, because it’s easy to misread. It is not a count of how many kids that age exist in America, and it’s not an arbitrary slice the Dells decided to stop at. It’s simply what $6.25 billion buys at $250 a head: $6.25 billion ÷ $250 = 25 million grants.
Here’s the important part: that number was sized to cover essentially the entire eligible group, not a lucky fraction of it. By the Dells’ own accounting, the money will reach nearly 80% of all American children age 10 and under who were born before 2025 — across about 75% of the country’s ZIP codes. So this isn’t a lottery for a few. It’s built to reach almost every kid in the target range, first-come until the 25 million are activated, with any leftover funds going to children older than 10. The honest answer to “did they fund enough for all the kids that age?” is: yes, near enough — they funded the whole target group, minus the wealthiest slice.
And that targeting is the quietly smart part of the whole thing:
It’s income-screened, but barely. To qualify, a child has to live in a ZIP code where median household income is $150,000 or less. That excludes only the richest areas — the families who’d notice a $250 deposit least — while still sweeping in the overwhelming majority of American kids. Nearly everyone qualifies; only the very top is left out. It’s a means test light enough that it doesn’t turn into the usual paperwork gauntlet, but real enough that the money flows toward the kids who need it.
It doesn’t duplicate the government. The $250 goes specifically to kids who missed the federal $1,000 newborn deposit — those born before 2025. No child double-dips, and the private money fills exactly the gap the federal program leaves open. The Dell gift and the Treasury seed interlock instead of overlapping.
It’s nearly automatic. Parents open or activate a Trump Account, and the $250 arrives. No essay, no caseworker, no proving your hardship.
Put those together and it’s about the most efficient targeting you could design: near-universal reach, a feather-light means test that skips only the rich, and a clean dovetail with the existing federal program so not a dollar is wasted paying twice. Whatever you think of the branding, the mechanism is thoughtful.
The charity Give Directly built its reputation on an idea that sounded almost heretical to the aid world: instead of routing help to the poor through layers of programs, staff, and overhead, just give people the money directly and trust them with it — an approach that keeps holding up in controlled studies against more paternalistic alternatives. The Dell gift is that same instinct, pointed at the future instead of the present. No agency, no strings, no overhead skimming the top; the $250 lands straight in the child’s own account and starts working. The only twist is that it’s locked and invested, so “direct cash” becomes “direct capital” — compounding for decades instead of spent today.
Why $250 at age zero is worth more than it looks
Here’s the thing about that $250. Left untouched until adulthood and invested in a low-cost index fund, it becomes a very different animal than $250 handed over as cash — because you’ve given it the one input money can’t buy back: decades.
At a 7% return above inflation — a reasonable long-run number for a broad stock index, stated in today’s dollars — here’s what a single seed becomes if it’s left alone:
Starting seed
At age 18
At age 60
At age 65
$250 (the Dell gift)
~$845
~$14,500
~$20,300
$1,000 (federal newborn deposit)
~$3,380
~$57,900
~$81,300
$18,000 (a committed family seed)
~$60,800
~$1,040,000
~$1,460,000
All figures in today’s dollars (e.g., a 7% return above inflation). This is the purchasing power the money would have in the future: invest $18k for your child today and they’ll have $1 million of purchasing power, in today’s dollars, at 60. The actual account balance will be multiple millions, due to inflation.
The $250 alone won’t retire anyone. By 18 it’s worth a used laptop. But that was never the point. The point is that the account now exists, it has a balance, and the kid grows up watching it grow. Dell said it plainly in his own interviews: kids with accounts — even with modest sums in them — tend to have better outcomes than kids without. The dollars are the smaller half of the gift. The bigger half is that a child now has a stake in the future and a front-row seat to compounding.
The number that should keep you up at night
Look at the bottom row again. Eighteen thousand dollars, put in at birth and never touched, becomes roughly a million dollars in today’s purchasing power by age 60. Not nominal, inflated-away dollars — a real million.
That’s the cheapest million any of us will ever have access to, and almost nobody uses it. Not because $18,000 is unreachable — plenty of families spend more than that on a single vehicle — but because the window that makes it work slams shut a little more every year the account sits empty. The same $18,000 started at age 10 instead of age 0 loses roughly half its ending value. Started at 20, you’ve thrown away three-quarters of it. Time is the ingredient, and it’s the only one you can’t buy later.
That’s what makes the Dells’ move so smart. They didn’t try to solve poverty with the size of the check. They attacked the timing — getting a seed into the ground for millions of kids while those kids still have 60-plus years of compounding ahead of them. It’s the highest-leverage philanthropic dollar there is.
It would take 72 people
Here’s another thought
The Dells gave $250 per kid. But run the same idea can go further. Consider a $18,000 seed, the amount that compounds into a real million by age 60 — and the total for all 25 million eligible kids comes to $450 billion.
That sounds impossibly large until you divide it by what the Dells already proved one family will give: $450 billion ÷ $6.25 billion = 72. Seventy-two more gifts the exact size of the Dells’ would fully fund an $18,000 head start for every eligible child in the country.
One note before the numbers below: every net-worth figure in this piece is from the Forbes 400 as of September 1, 2025. I deliberately froze the math to one dated, settled snapshot so it stays internally consistent — but fortunes at this altitude move fast, and several of these are already very different today (some dramatically so). Read them as a fixed reference point I had to pick, not a live quote. Many of these people’s net worths have grown greatly in that time.
Seventy-two. Out of a group that is not remotely that small:
The 400 richest Americans are worth a combined $6.6 trillion. The entire $450 billion is less than 7% of that one list.
The top 20 Americans alone hold about $3 trillion — nearly half of all U.S. billionaire wealth. The whole program would cost 15% of just their fortunes, and nothing of anyone else’s.
The Dells’ own $6.25 billion came out of a fortune well north of $100 billion.
And the number that shows how within reach this really is: that same Forbes 400 got $1.2 trillion richer in a single year. The entire cost of giving 25 million American kids a genuine shot at a million-dollar retirement is less than half of what this group gained last year alone.
It’s also worth sizing $450 billion against what the country spends without blinking. To be clear, I’m not pointing at the billionaires alone and saying “you should fund this” — I’m just laying out the math for the many possible routes to funding it. The United States spends about $1 trillion on its military every single year. The full cost of handing 25 million kids an $18,000 head start is less than half of one year’s defense budget — and, crucially, it’s a one-time event, not an annual line item. The military costs that much again next year, and the year after. This would happen once and then compound on its own for sixty years. Measured against the U.S.–Iran war of 2025–26 — which the Pentagon’s own accounting put at roughly $29 billion (independent estimates run higher, near $40 billion; war-cost figures are contested and still moving) — $450 billion is on the order of fifteen of those wars. Same money, wildly different afterlife: one version is spent and gone; the other sits in twenty-five million children’s names, growing, for the rest of their lives.
The money already exists, concentrated in a few hundred hands. The Dells showed it can be done and exactly how to do it. The only thing missing is 71 more people willing to sign the same check.
Or: everyone gives the same slice
The version above treats a $12 billion fortune and a $428 billion fortune as if they should write the same check. They shouldn’t. So here’s another option — draw a line, and everyone above it could decide to give the same percentage of what they have.
Put the line at $12 billion. For scale: the cutoff just to make the Forbes 400 at all is $3.8 billion — the poorest people on the entire list are worth that much (2025’s floor includes newcomers like early AppLovin investor Eduardo Vivas, at exactly $3.8 billion). A $12 billion floor therefore asks nothing of roughly the bottom 330 names and leans entirely on the very top.
That leaves about the 70 wealthiest Americans, worth a combined ~$4.2 trillion. (The top 50 alone are worth $3.9 trillion, and the 50th-richest American — Jerry Jones — is still worth $19.6 billion, so the $12 billion club runs roughly twenty names deeper than the published top 50. I’ve estimated that tail from the $19.6 billion mark down to the floor; the exact total drifts with the market.)
Raising $450 billion from a $4.2 trillion pool, with everyone contributing the identical share of their wealth, comes to about 10.6% — a tenth of their net worth, paid once. Up and down the ladder, that looks like this:
Person (2025 rank)
Net worth
Gift at ~10.6%
Elon Musk (#1)
$428B
~$45B
Jeff Bezos (#4)
$241B
~$26B
Michael Dell (#10)
$129B
~$14B
Alice Walton (#15)
$106B
~$11B
Stephen Schwarzman (#20)
$51.9B
~$5.5B
Jerry Jones (#50)
$19.6B
~$2.1B
Anyone at the floor
$12B
~$1.3B
Read down the ladder and the pattern is simple: the larger the fortune, the larger the check, but the percentage is identical for everyone — a tenth, once. That’s the whole point of splitting it by share instead of by flat dollar amount. It scales to what each person actually has, so the same gesture asks the same thing of everyone on the list. And it could be scaled even further down — to people worth a mere $100 million, if they wanted in. It’s all opt-in; again, I’m just showing the potential math, and maybe someone richer will run with it.
What about just one year’s newborns?
Now shrink the question down. Forget the 25 million older kids for a moment. What would it cost to give every single baby born in the United States in one year the full $18,000 — the seed that becomes a real million by age 60?
In 2024, 3.63 million babies were born in the U.S. At $18,000 each, funding the entire cohort — every newborn in America, rich or poor, no exceptions — costs about $65 billion.
The federal government already does a shrunken version of exactly this: it seeds each newborn’s Trump Account with $1,000, which runs about $3.6 billion a year. Going from $1,000 to $18,000 — from a nice token to a genuinely life-altering sum — would cost roughly $61 billion more per birth-year. And doing it every year, forever, for every new class of American babies? About $65 billion annually. That’s less than 1% of the annual yearly US government budget.
The Social Security angle
Here’s where that $65 billion a year gets genuinely interesting.
Social Security is the single largest program in the federal budget — it paid out about $1.6 trillion in 2025 to roughly 70 million people, close to a fifth of everything the federal government spends. And it’s in well-documented trouble. The 2025 Trustees Report projects the retirement trust fund runs dry around 2033 — and a 2025 law has since nudged that to late 2032. When it happens, incoming payroll taxes will cover only about 77% of promised benefits, meaning an automatic 23% cut for everyone, unless Congress raises taxes or trims benefits first. The program’s shortfall over the next 75 years is estimated at roughly $25 trillion.
Now set the newborn-seeding number next to that. Funding an $18,000 account for every baby born in a year costs about $65 billion — a little over 4% of a single year’s Social Security spending. For roughly four cents on every dollar Social Security already pays out, you could hand every American newborn a seed that grows, untouched, into about a million dollars of real retirement money by their sixties.
Be honest about what that does and doesn’t fix. It does nothing for the 2033 cliff. The babies seeded today don’t retire for sixty-plus years, so current retirees and the near-term shortfall need their own answer.
It is a structural fix on a long delay. Social Security’s core problem is demographic: it’s pay-as-you-go, and there are fewer workers standing behind each retiree every decade. Seeding newborns attacks the squeeze from the other end. A generation that reaches retirement already holding a private million — money that compounded on its own, entirely outside the payroll-tax system — is a generation that leans on Social Security far less. That opens doors a cash-strapped program can’t otherwise touch: you could means-test more comfortably, restructure benefits, or simply let a partly self-funded cohort take pressure off the system without pushing anyone into poverty. Run the seeding for twenty years and it totals on the order of $1.3 trillion — a fraction of the $25 trillion hole, except it doesn’t plug the hole so much as slowly make the hole matter less.
As one piece of the long-run answer, “give every citizen a funded head start on their own retirement” is among the few ideas that gets cheaper and more powerful the earlier you start it. Which is the same lesson as everything else in this piece — only here it’s aimed at the whole country at once.
Not everyone will cheer
A gift like this draws two reactions, and they tell you a lot about the person reacting.
The first is gratitude — the obvious one. Someone with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes put a real asset into the hands of a child who had nothing, and asked for nothing back.
The second is the reflex to turn it into an indictment: see, this proves a handful of people have too much; the answer is to tax them, not thank them. That argument isn’t crazy on its face. Fortunes this size do sit alongside real need, and $250 or $325 million is a rounding error against the wealth behind it. Reasonable people can debate the tax code, and they should — on its own terms.
But look at what that reflex actually does. If the public answer to a man putting $6.25 billion into poor kids’ investment accounts is “this is why we need higher taxes,” you’ve just told every other billionaire in the country that generosity buys them an attack instead of goodwill. That is precisely how you get less of it. Nobody writes the next check to become the villain in someone else’s argument.
The better response — the one that produces more seeded kids, not fewer — is to treat this as unambiguously good and say so loudly. Brad Gerstner, one of the people behind the program, has framed it as a “50-state challenge”: philanthropists claiming states one by one, a friendly race to see who can set up the most kids. That’s exactly the right energy. A billionaire who funds a whole state’s worth of children should get the headline they’d actually want.
And be honest about mixed motives, because they matter less than critics think. Some of these gifts are partly PR. Some companies signing on have political favors in mind. Fine. The four-year-old with a share of stock locked away until adulthood does not care what was in the giver’s heart — the compounding works the same either way. When the urge to look generous produces actual generosity aimed at kids who need it, the smart move is to lean into the incentive, not sneer at it.
None of this is an argument against government or policy. It’s an argument against poisoning a genuinely good act — because the reflex to do so costs the exact children everyone claims to be worried about.
The list is already growing
The Dells started something, and they’re no longer alone. A roster of people has stepped up to put real assets into kids’ accounts, and it’s worth naming them — setting a child up for a lifetime of compounding deserves to be on the record.
Gwynne and Robert Shotwell. The president of SpaceX and her husband gave one share of SpaceX stock to each of more than two million children aged 11 to 17 in lower-income areas — worth roughly $320 million, tilted toward kids near their central Texas home. Every one of those children now literally owns a piece of a rocket company, locked away until they turn 18.
Ray and Barbara Dalio. The Bridgewater founder and his wife pledged $250 apiece for roughly 300,000 children across Connecticut.
Brad Gerstner. The Altimeter Capital investor — one of the program’s architects — is seeding accounts for Indiana kids under five, some 400,000 of them, and is the one pushing the 50-state challenge.
Kraken. The crypto exchange is sponsoring an account for every single child born in Wyoming in 2026.
Then there’s the corporate wall. Dozens of companies — the Treasury counted more than fifty by late August — are matching the government’s $1,000 for their employees’ newborns. The usual financial giants are in (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Schwab), but so is a crowd that should catch the eye of anyone who cares about sound money: Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Jack Dorsey’s Block, and — going furthest of all — Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, which is adding $250 a year for every U.S. employee’s child under 18, not just newborns.
There’s something fitting in that. The people who talk the most about hard money and long time horizons are the ones lining up to fund 60-year compounding accounts for children. That’s the whole argument of this blog in miniature: put a good asset in early, then get out of time’s way.
And the lane is wide open for the giving-focused to do more. Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Jack Dorsey — people who’ve built their public identities around giving money away — could each seed entire states without feeling the dent. Shotwell already proved you don’t even need cash: you can gift the asset itself. Picture a child’s account holding a share of Amazon, a share of Block, or a sliver of bitcoin — bought once and left alone for eighteen years. (The mechanics for donating stock and other assets are still being finalized, but the door is open.) The tools exist. What’s missing is more people willing to walk through it, and a culture that claps when they do.
One name missing from the list
There’s a conspicuous absence on the donor roll, and it’s worth naming precisely because the accounts carry his name. President Trump created the program, headlines its summits, and has personally called on the country’s business leaders and philanthropists to fund it — his Treasury even branded the ask a “50-State Challenge.” Yet as of this writing there’s no public record of Trump putting in a dollar of his own.
That stands out for two reasons. First, it’s literally his name on the accounts — if anyone’s own money belongs in there, it’s his. Second, he can obviously afford it: he sits at No. 201 on the very Forbes 400 this piece is built around, and his estimated net worth jumped from about $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion in a single year of being president. The presidency has made him dramatically richer.
So the optic isn’t just striking — it’s backwards. The man asking everyone else to fund the kids’ accounts with his name on them hasn’t opened his own wallet, while a hedge-fund manager, a rocket company’s president, and a software CEO have. If the whole game is making generosity contagious, the person whose name is at the top of the letterhead should be first in line, not missing from it — even a symbolic $250-a-kid gesture somewhere would do more for the cause than another summit. He can plainly afford it, and it’s his name on the door. He should write the check.
We should want a lot more of this
So here’s the encouragement, and it runs four directions:
To other people with means: this is the template. You don’t need $6.25 billion. Employers can seed accounts for employees’ kids. Wealthy families, foundations, churches, hometown boosters, and small-business owners can seed the accounts of the kids around them. A $250 gift to a newborn is worth more to that child’s life than a $2,500 gift at their high school graduation, and it costs a tenth as much. Match the Dells’ idea at whatever scale you’ve got.
To grandparents and parents: you already have the most powerful version of this, and it requires no billionaire. Watch how fast the target fills once everyone does a little. A child born today gets $1,000 from the Treasury. If a parent’s employer is one of the dozens now matching, that’s another $1,000 — the account is at $2,000 before the family has saved a dime. That leaves $16,000 to reach the $18,000 that becomes a real million. A grandparent’s $1,000 in year one. A birthday that’s a deposit instead of more plastic. An aunt, an uncle, a godparent adding what they can. Spread across a childhood and left to compound, $16,000 isn’t a mountain — it’s a handful of small, deliberate deposits by people who love the kid. If you’re going to give a child money anyway, give it to them at age 2, not age 22.
To everyone else: you don’t need a kid of your own to do this. Any child with an account can receive a contribution from anyone. If you know a young family stretched thin, the highest-return gift you will ever hand them is a few hundred dollars in their child’s account before that child can walk — plus a nudge to open one if they haven’t. Give to the accounts of the kids in your life. You can even contribute directly to any child’s Trump Account with a QR code the account generates — a genuinely useful feature. The money never touches the parents, never gets spent on something else, and never gets forgotten: it’s auto-invested. It’s a great account and a great tool.
To the kid, eventually: the account teaches the lesson the money can’t. A child who watches $250 quietly turn into $845, then keeps adding, learns in their bones what most adults never internalize — that patient capital beats almost everything, and that the earliest dollar is always the most valuable one.
And for anyone weighing whether to do this at scale, it’s worth being honest about the upside to the giver, too. This is one of the rare gifts almost impossible to read as anything but good — no downside headline, no “but was it really effective” hand-wringing, no overhead quietly eating the donation, just a child, by name, with an account that grows for sixty years. The Dells, the Shotwells, the Dalios didn’t only set kids up; they attached their names to about the most defensible act of generosity available anywhere right now. In a moment when great wealth mostly attracts suspicion, funding a generation’s head start earns something rarer and harder to buy: goodwill nobody can argue with. It’s good for the kid and good for the giver at the same time — which is exactly what should make it an easy yes.
Michael and Susan Dell found the single most efficient thing you can do with a philanthropic dollar and did it 25 million times. The right response isn’t just applause. It’s imitation.
Give a kid a head start. The math is on your side, and it never gets cheaper than today.
A lot of the recent surge in socialsm is understandable based on the blatant grift of the current administration. The economy doesn’t seem to be working for many. I wanted to share some thought about some potential paths to make everyone an owner in our society. I think it’s good on many levels. It gives people ownership and a stake in the society. It gives people hope that they’ll actually be able to retire someday. It’s not a perfect proposal. I am still working on my thoughts on this. But I think this is directionally useful to show people some of the current numbers for the stock market. It’s more useful than the “tax the billionares” rehetoric which doesn’t actually help the bottom 50%. This also proposes some solutions of how to help fix the Social Security insolvency issue. I hope to see more dialog on these issues. Thank you for reading.
This was all prompted by the below 3 videos along with many years of thinking on these topics.
“The only way to raise the poor from poverty is to give them better tools to produce more.” — something I wrote here back in 2018. I still believe it. This is the next piece of that argument.
Where we actually are
The U.S. stock market is worth somewhere around $75 trillion today. Depending on exactly what you count and which day you look, you’ll see figures from about $75 trillion up to $78 trillion. Call it $75 trillion to be safe.
There are roughly 343 million people in this country, about 277 million of them adults, and something like 255 million adults who are citizens. If you took that whole $75 trillion and split it evenly across every adult citizen, everyone would get about $294,000. At the higher market-cap number it’s closer to $306,000. So call the number roughly $300,000 of stock market wealth per adult.
That is a real number and it’s worth sitting with for a second. If every adult citizen owned an equal slice of American business, each of us would be sitting on about $300,000 in equity. Not income — equity. A claim on the machines, the brands, the buildings, the software, and the future profits of the entire American economy.
Now here’s the part that should stop you cold. Almost nobody has anything close to that.
That $300,000 is a mean — total pie divided by number of people. It is not what the typical person has, because the pie is not split evenly. It is split about as unevenly as it has ever been split in the history of the data:
The top 10% of households own about 87% of all stocks.
The top 1% alone own about half of all equities — more than the entire bottom 90% combined.
The bottom 50% of Americans own about 1% of stocks, worth around $590 billion out of $75 trillion.
Measured across all wealth, not just stocks, the top 1% hold about 32% of net worth, a record high, while the bottom half hold about 2.5%.
And ownership isn’t even that widespread to begin with. About 58% of adults own any stock at all, and that number recently ticked down. Most of the people who do own stock own it through a 401(k) and don’t own very much of it. The median American household has roughly $39,000 in financial assets outside their home. Among families that actually have a retirement account, the median balance is around $87,000 — but roughly half of households have no retirement account at all, and once you count those zeros, the median retirement savings across all households falls to somewhere around $27,000.
So we have a country where the average adult’s “fair share” of the stock market is $300,000, and the typical person’s actual share is a small fraction of that. That gap — between the mean and the reality — is the whole problem in one picture.
What I am not arguing
I want to be clear up front, because this is where most people get the argument wrong.
I am not saying we should take the top’s shares and hand them out. I said in 2018 that redistribution of wealth isn’t sufficient to fix poverty, and I still mean it. If someone built a company from nothing, added value people actually pay for, and got rich doing it, taking their stake away is both wrong and beside the point. It also doesn’t scale — as we’ll see in a minute, there literally isn’t enough at the top to hand everyone a comfortable life, and the moment you start confiscating you kill the thing that makes the pie grow in the first place.
I am also not arguing for equality. I don’t care very much whether the gap between the top and the bottom is wide. What I care about is the floor. The right question is not “how big is the gap” but “is the person at the bottom continually getting access to more — clean water, a roof, transportation, energy, the next useful thing?” If the floor keeps rising, the gap can stay wide and I’m fine with that. Inequality of outcome at the top is the price of a system that keeps inventing things. Inequality of access at the bottom is the thing we should attack.
So the goal isn’t to flatten anything. The goal is a shareholder society: an economy where everyone owns a piece of the productive machine, everyone therefore has a claim on what it produces, and — this is the part that matters most to me — everyone gets a vote through those shares in what the machine actually does. Especially as more and more of the work gets done by machines and fewer people are needed to run a company, ownership becomes the way ordinary people stay connected to the economy at all. If your labor isn’t needed, your shares are how you eat and how you’re heard.
Trump Accounts: a genuinely good start
This is why I’m actually encouraged by the new Trump Accounts.
Here’s the mechanism. Every American citizen child born from 2025 through 2028 gets a one-time $1,000 seed from the Treasury, invested in a low-cost, broad U.S. stock index fund with the expense ratio capped at 0.10%. Families can add up to $5,000 a year. At 18 it converts into a traditional IRA. The Treasury’s own projection is that a single $1,000 deposit grows to roughly $500,000 by age 60.
Structurally, this is the shareholder society in miniature. Auto-enrolled. Index-based. Every citizen kid holding a stake in American business from the day they’re born. It is the closest thing we’ve built to “everyone’s an owner,” and it starts people compounding at the one moment they have the most valuable asset of all: time.
I want to give it real credit, because the mechanism is right. But I also want to be honest about what it does and doesn’t do.
What the $1,000 actually becomes
Let’s be careful with the Treasury’s half-million-dollar headline. $1,000 growing to $500,000 over 60 years works out to about an 11% annual return, and that’s a nominal number — not adjusted for inflation. In the dollars you actually spend, it’s a lot smaller.
Let’s use an honest, conservative assumption instead: 7% return above inflation, which is roughly what U.S. stocks have delivered over the long run. A single $1,000 seed, left completely alone, no further contributions, grows to about $58,000 in today’s dollars over 60 years.
Fifty-eight thousand dollars. From one thousand, with nobody adding a cent.
Is that enough to live on? No. Not remotely. But here’s what should land: $58,000 from a single untouched $1,000 seed is more than what a typical American has saved for retirement after an entire working life. Among families that have a retirement account, the median is around $87,000 — but about half of households have no account at all, and counting everyone, the median retirement savings is closer to $27,000. So a birth seed that just sits there and compounds would end up ahead of where the typical household lands after 40 years of trying.
That comparison isn’t a brag about the seed. It’s an indictment of how little we accumulate — and it points straight at the real lever. The seed “wins” not because $1,000 is a lot, but because it gets 60 uninterrupted years of compounding, and most people never give themselves that. Time in the market is the scarce resource, and most of us start decades too late. Hold onto that, because it’s the key to the whole thing.
Setting the goal: what “enough” actually looks like
Let me put a real target on the table, because I think you have to name the goal before you can talk about how to reach it. And I want to be clear about what this next part is: it is a goal, not a demand that we get there tomorrow. If the honest path to this goal is funding today’s kids and letting them grow into it over a lifetime, that is completely acceptable. Goals are supposed to be out ahead of you.
Here’s the exercise. Pick the nest egg a person needs at 65 to actually live off of — on top of Social Security, which averages about $24,000 a year. Then work backward: every younger person should hold the amount that, growing at 7% a year above inflation, lands them at that target by 65. Retirees get the full amount, because they’re out of time to compound. I split the adult population into the normal age bands and ran it.
One thing I want to flag before the numbers, because it matters for the whole design: I’m leaning on Social Security to fill part of the floor, and Social Security is itself insolvent. Its trust fund is projected to run dry in the early 2030s, at which point benefits get automatically cut by roughly a quarter unless Congress acts. And the way we’ve always “fixed” it is the same move every time — take more from the people working now to pay the people retired now, then come back in a couple of decades and take more from workers again. That’s not a solution, it’s a treadmill. It’s an endless cycle of taking more from each new generation of workers to cover a promise the last generation never funded. The whole point of saving real, owned, compounding money for young people is to get off that treadmill — to fund the floor with an asset that grows on its own instead of a claim on the next worker’s paycheck. So when I put Social Security in the math below, read it as the shaky thing we’re trying to supplement and eventually lean on less, not the thing we’re counting on forever.
Target: $750,000 at 65 (throws off about $30,000 a year at a safe 4% withdrawal, so roughly $54,000 a year with Social Security — a genuinely livable floor):
Age band
Adults
Stake needed per person
Years left to grow
Cost of the band
18–24
31.6M
$38,200
~44
$1.2T
25–34
48.4M
$70,200
~35
$3.4T
35–44
45.9M
$138,200
~25
$6.3T
45–54
42.4M
$271,800
~15
$11.5T
55–64
45.2M
$534,600
~5
$24.2T
65–74
36.7M
$750,000
0
$27.5T
75+
26.8M
$750,000
0
$20.1T
Total
277M
—
—
$94.3T
Look at the total: $94.3 trillion. The entire U.S. stock market is about $75 trillion. So at a $750,000 floor, you cannot get there by dividing up what already exists — the bill is bigger than the whole pie. There isn’t enough equity in America to put every adult on a decent-retirement track today. This is my 2018 point landing with a number attached: there is not yet enough wealth, so the pie has to grow. You can’t slice your way there.
Run it leaner, at a $500,000 target (about $20,000 a year from the portfolio, roughly $44,000 a year with Social Security):
Age band
Stake needed per person
Cost of the band
18–24
$25,500
$0.8T
25–34
$46,800
$2.3T
35–44
$92,100
$4.2T
45–54
$181,200
$7.7T
55–64
$356,400
$16.1T
65–74
$500,000
$18.4T
75+
$500,000
$13.4T
Total
—
$62.8T
At $500,000 the whole thing costs about $62.8 trillion, which does fit inside $75 trillion. But notice what “fitting” would mean if you tried to do it by confiscation: you’d be handing over about 84% of the entire stock market. And even that extreme wouldn’t create equality — the remaining 16%, about $12 trillion, would still sit largely with the people at the top, which per person is still an enormous amount. So even the nuclear option leaves us unequal, just less concentrated than today. Which is fine by me — remember, I don’t care about the gap. But it also proves the point: distribution doesn’t even get you to equality, and there isn’t enough to go around anyway. Confiscation is the wrong tool.
Now compare either target to what people actually have — and here you have to be careful which number you quote, because there are two very different pictures. Among households aged 55–64 that have a retirement account, the median balance is about $185,000. That sounds like a real head start until you remember it leaves out everyone with nothing. And a lot of people have nothing: roughly half of American households have no dedicated retirement account at all. Count those zeros back in, and the median 55–64 household drops to somewhere around $71,000. Across all families of every age, counting everyone, the median retirement savings is closer to $27,000.
So take your pick, and both are worth saying out loud. The typical near-retiree who managed to save has maybe $185,000. The typical near-retiree including everyone who didn’t has more like $71,000. Against a goal of $500,000–$750,000, that’s a gap of three to four times for the savers, and seven to ten times once you count the people who reached the end of a working life with almost nothing. The second number is the one a floor is supposed to be about — the floor isn’t measured by the people who already have an account, it’s measured by the people who don’t. That is the size of what we’re trying to close. It’s big. But naming it honestly is the only way to size the solution.
And here’s the thing the table reveals that changes everything about how you’d do it: the young are absurdly cheap to fund, and the old are what breaks the bank.
Everyone under 35 — about 80 million people, nearly a third of all adults — costs just $4.6 trillion to fully fund at the $750,000 target. That’s about 6% of the market for a third of the population.
The three bands 55 and up cost $71.8 trillion — 76% of the entire market.
The whole difference is compounding. A 21-year-old needs only about $38,000 today to reach $750,000 by 65, because 44 years of growth does the other $712,000 of the work. A 68-year-old needs the full amount in cash right now, because they have no time left. Time does the heavy lifting, and the young have all of it. That is exactly why seeding people young is the smart, cheap, powerful move — and why funding today’s retirees is the expensive transition problem that no seed can solve. The goal points us straight at the strategy: start people at birth.
The six-point framework
Everything I’ve argued fits into one simple idea. The livability of your floor is basically a fraction:
Floor = income ÷ cost of living.
You raise the floor by pushing on either term. Raise what people can claim, or lower what living costs. Do both and they multiply — a modest stake in a cheap world beats a big stake in an expensive one. Here’s the whole framework in six points:
The measure is the floor, not the gap. Success is the bottom’s absolute access rising over time. Inequality at the top can persist; that’s fine. We watch the floor, not the ceiling.
Floor = income ÷ cost. Two levers, not one. Everything else is either raising the numerator or lowering the denominator.
Lower the denominator through disruption. New products win by competing against non-consumption — serving people who were priced out entirely, at a price point that didn’t exist before. That’s how the poor get their first car, their first clean water, their first anything. Cheap beats fancy when cheap reaches people fancy never could.
Where prices won’t fall, something is usually blocking them. When a necessity stays expensive decade after decade, the cause is almost always an artificial constraint — regulation, licensing, a credential monopoly, a subsidy — not physics. Find the constraint, remove it, and let disruption reach the good.
Raise the numerator through universal ownership. As automation thins out wages, shares replace the paycheck as the ordinary person’s claim on output. This is what Trump Accounts start — and the ownership stake matters most in exactly the categories where cost stays stubbornly high and disruption can’t finish the job.
The shares have to carry a real vote. Ownership without governance is just a dividend check. In an economy increasingly run by machines, whoever votes the shares runs everything — so the vote has to reach the actual citizen. (More on how below.)
Raising the income side: seed the kids
The income lever is ownership, and the model above already told us the smart way to do it: fund people when they’re young and let time do the work. So let’s cost that out honestly, because the number is genuinely surprising.
I ran the compounding: $18,000, invested once at 7% above inflation, grows to about $1 million in 60 years. One deposit. In today’s dollars. A newborn seeded with $18,000 would retire a millionaire in real purchasing power, without another cent added, without depending on whether their parents could afford to contribute.
Let me be clear that I’m using $18,000 as a modeling number, not a proposal I’m ready to plant a flag on. Honestly, I suspect it’s too much — it’s the figure that fully funds a $1-million outcome from a single deposit, so think of it as the upper end of the range, the “what would it take to do the whole job at birth” number. The real program probably lands well below it. But it’s worth pricing out the full version, because the total is smaller than you’d guess.
So what would it cost to seed every American child at that level? About 3.6 million babies are born in this country each year. At $18,000 each, that’s roughly $65 billion a year.
Hold that up against the federal budget, which ran about $7 trillion last year. Sixty-five billion is a bit under 1% of what the government already spends. Even the maximum version of this idea — full funding to a million-dollar outcome — costs less than a penny on the federal dollar. The current $1,000 Trump Account seed, by comparison, runs about $3.6 billion a year for a birth cohort and grows to that $58,000 we talked about. So the whole realistic range, from the $1,000 we’re already doing up to the $18,000 that finishes the job, fits between a rounding error and 1% of the budget.
But the budget isn’t even the right yardstick. The right comparison is the retirement promise we’ve already made and haven’t funded. Social Security’s unfunded obligation — the gap between what it’s promised and what it’s projected to collect — is about $29 trillion over the next 75 years in present-value terms, and by the infinite-horizon measure closer to $73 trillion, roughly twice the size of the entire economy. Per household, the 75-year shortfall works out to about $192,000. The trust fund is projected to run dry around 2033, at which point benefits get automatically cut by roughly a quarter unless Congress acts.
That is the number to weigh a seed program against. We are already on the hook for tens of trillions in an unfunded, pay-as-you-go promise — one where today’s taxes pay today’s benefits and the shortfall gets pushed onto future workers. A seed account is the opposite kind of obligation: it’s pre-funded and compounding, a real asset that grows on its own and eventually needs nobody to tax. Sixty-five billion a year is about two-tenths of one percent of the $29 trillion hole we’re already standing in. So the honest question isn’t “can we afford to seed kids” — we’re already committed to something vastly larger and shakier. The question is whether it makes sense to build a small, funded, self-growing stake alongside the unfunded one, and over time lean more on the thing that pays for itself. I think that’s at least worth a serious argument.
This is the cheap end of the income lever, and it’s cheap for one reason: it uses the kids’ 60 years of compounding, so a little money now does the work that would cost a fortune later. It does not fund today’s retirees — that’s the hard transition problem, where the existing safety net and a growing pie have to carry the load. But for everyone not yet born, or newly born, a real ownership stake is within reach for a fraction of what we already spend, and a fraction of what we’ve already promised.
I’m going to leave the hard question of exactly where the money comes from for another day — this article is about the goal and the shape of the solution, not the appropriations fight. It’s a real question and it deserves its own piece; for now, take the seed as a line item to be funded like any other priority, and let’s not pretend I’ve solved that part here. What I’ll say is that the structure matters as much as the source: the growth should come from a broad, universal feed rather than from what each family can spare, and it should land in your own account, not one giant government pool. Norway built a roughly $1-trillion sovereign fund from oil that now holds around $200,000 per citizen — proof the scale is achievable. The difference in my version is that the shares, and the votes attached to them, belong to individuals, not to a fund that votes on everyone’s behalf.
This is also why the idea that we’re heading for a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia is wrong. I like Elon, but “we won’t need money” is a dumb prediction. There is always something genuinely scarce — the best land, the most skilled human care, the next thing nobody’s invented yet — and for whatever is truly scarce you need a price, and you need money to ration and signal it. Maybe most goods get cheap enough to feel free someday. But there’s always a residual, and money is how we handle the residual. The ownership stake exists precisely to give ordinary people a claim on that residual.
Lowering the cost side
Here’s the good news the income side needs: you don’t have to hit the full target if the cost of a decent life keeps falling. Remember the fraction — floor equals income over cost. Everything you knock off the denominator lowers the numerator you have to fund. If a decent life costs $400,000 to sustain instead of $750,000, the whole retirement model suddenly fits with room to spare. The two levers aren’t independent; cutting costs is what makes the ownership stake affordable.
And for a huge range of goods, costs have been falling, hard. Electronics, computing, information, communication, media — the price of all of it has collapsed. Things that were luxuries a generation ago are now in nearly every pocket in the country. Nobody took a rich person’s phone and handed it to a poor person. The price fell until it reached everyone. That’s the floor rising through disruption, exactly as point 3 describes — and cheap electric cars and automated transportation are the next necessity crossing from “priced out” to “everyone can have it.”
Now the bad news, and the real work. The categories that actually decide whether someone’s floor is livable — housing, healthcare, education, childcare and eldercare — have gone the other way. Prices there have risen for decades while everything digital got cheaper. If the floor is going to keep rising, these are the targets. For each one, the framework says: identify what specifically is holding the price up, and ask whether that constraint is captured or real.
Housing. Mostly captured, not physical. Land near jobs is scarce, but the bigger driver is policy: zoning that bans density, lot-size minimums, parking mandates, permitting delays, reviews weaponized to block building. Construction is one of the only industries that got less productive over 50 years, partly because you can’t mass-produce a house when every town has different rules. The fix is nameable: factory-built and modular housing plus zoning reform. Our most winnable stubborn category.
Healthcare. Part real, mostly captured. Yes, it takes highly trained people. But we cap the supply of those people (residency slots, scope-of-practice laws that stop nurses and pharmacists from doing what they’re trained for), we hide prices so the market can’t work, and we tie insurance to employers so nobody sees the cost. The disruption path — pushing care down the chain from specialist to GP to nurse to app to self-care — mostly exists. What’s missing is permission.
Education. Largely captured and already half-disrupted. The information is free now. What costs money is the credential, protected by accreditation and inflated by subsidized loans. The fight is whether an alternative credential can beat the incumbent’s signal.
Childcare and eldercare. The most genuinely real constraint. A lot of the value is literally a human being present and paying attention, and that resists automation by its nature. Some cost is regulatory, but even stripped down it’s people-heavy.
See the pattern? The categories that stayed cheap were the ones we allowed to be disrupted. The ones that got expensive are the ones where the cheaper competitor is often literally illegal — you can’t build the dense housing, can’t let the nurse practice, can’t sell the un-accredited course. They’re expensive because someone captured the rules to keep them that way, not because we can’t make them cheaper.
That gives the two halves of the framework a clean division of labor, which is really the whole thesis in one sentence:
Deregulate to let falling prices reach the goods that are only expensive because the rules are rigged — and use the universal ownership stake to carry the floor across the few goods whose costs are genuinely, irreducibly real.
Disruption handles most of it. The shareholder stake exists for the residual — the human care, the truly scarce land, the physics floor on real things — that no amount of innovation drives to zero. That’s what the shareholder society is for. Not equalizing everyone. Backstopping the part of the floor that deflation can’t reach, and giving every citizen a vote in the machine while we’re at it.
Index funds don’t have to take away your vote
Here’s how voting works today. If everyone owns index funds, the vote gets swallowed by the big asset managers, because the fund is the legal shareholder of record and the fund company casts all the proxies. That’s a real concentration of power — a handful of firms voting a huge share of corporate America on everyone else’s behalf. But fixing it is simple arithmetic.
If you own an index fund and that fund holds 8% of its money in Nvidia, and you have $100,000 in the fund, then you own $8,000 of Nvidia. Simple as that. So you should get to vote $8,000 worth of Nvidia shares. Your ownership looks through the fund to the underlying companies, and your vote looks through right along with it, in exact proportion to what you actually own. Do that across every holding and every fund, and every shareholder — down to the person with a few thousand dollars in a Trump Account — votes their real, proportional slice of every company they’re invested in.
That’s the whole principle. It’s not a new theory of corporate law; it’s just pass-through voting, weighted by the dollars you hold. The asset manager stops being the one who decides and goes back to being what it should be — a middleman that administers your shares and casts the votes you direct.
And the mechanics are straightforward. Brokerages already know exactly who owns what, down to the share, across hundreds of millions of accounts — they have to, that’s the whole business. The look-through is grade-school arithmetic: your share of the fund times the fund’s share of each company. The plumbing to record it and pass the votes along already exists; the big managers have even started offering “voting choice” programs that do a version of it. The only thing missing is the decision to make it the default. You look through the fund. Your money’s already there; the vote should follow it.
Where this leaves us
Put it together and it’s not complicated, even if it’s ambitious:
Set the goal honestly — a real, livable ownership stake for every citizen, on the order of half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars at retirement. Accept that we can’t hand that out today, because there isn’t enough and confiscation would wreck the engine anyway. Then reach the goal from three directions at once. Seed the young, where even the full-freight version — enough to grow into a real million by retirement — costs well under 1% of the budget a year and a rounding fraction of the tens of trillions we’ve already promised through Social Security, because time does the work. Grow the pie, so there’s more to own tomorrow than there is today. And drive down the cost of living, breaking the captured rules that keep housing, care, and schooling artificially expensive, so that “enough” becomes a smaller number. Give every one of those shares a real, proportional vote. And let the ownership stake carry the floor across the handful of things that stay genuinely scarce.
We don’t win by making others lose. We win by raising the floor from both sides at once — driving the price of the next useful thing down until it reaches everyone, and giving every person a real, voting stake in the machine that makes it. The $1,000 seed is a start. Now let’s set the real goal, and go finish it.
MyWheelLife.com 