I have an apology to make, and I want to make it properly this time. I doubted the children’s investment accounts. I said they were a gimmick. I said the whole thing was a branding exercise with a stock chart attached. I was wrong, and I want to say so before anyone else does.

Because the facts, as the administration has stated them, are remarkable. Nearly seventy million Trump Accounts have been created, more than sixty million of them by automatic enrollment, and every American child under eighteen with a valid Social Security number now has one. I apologize for the cynicism. It turns out you really can give every child in the country a financial stake in the future in a single quarter.

I only ask one question, and I ask it as a friend. If every child has an account, why does a parent still have to claim it?

I apologize for the tone that follows. I know how it sounds. But the Treasury says a child’s account must be claimed by a parent or guardian before family members, friends, or employers may contribute, and claiming is what “establishes who has legal authority to access information and exercise control over the child’s account.” So the account exists, and the money does not, and the gap between the two is an app.

I’m sorry. I said it was a gimmick, and I meant it as an insult, and it turns out it was merely an observation. Because automatic enrollment, the Treasury is careful to say, will not trigger the thousand-dollar deposit. Families “must still elect to receive the government’s seed money.” The account is automatic. The gift is opt-in. I was wrong about the gimmick; the word I wanted was onboarding.

I apologize to the children, who cannot hear me, for mentioning this next part at all. The program’s rules were amended so that eligible wealthy investors may donate individual stocks, rather than only broad index funds, and the donated shares must generally be held for five years before sale. This is described as a way to encourage participation. The families, a professor of accounting notes, “wouldn’t get a say about which companies might donate to their children’s portfolios.” A child whose account holds one company’s stock is a child whose retirement is a position. I want to be fair to the program here, so I will simply note that I cannot think of another account for minors that a stranger may fund with a single company’s shares and the family may not refuse.

I apologize for the delay; I had to check the math. Because families must claim the account, and the seed money is not automatic, one estimate finds that about twenty percent of eligible babies may never claim their thousand dollars, which across the eligible cohort comes to roughly $2.88 billion in federal money that goes unclaimed not because it was denied but because someone did not fill out a form. I was wrong to call the program generous. It is conditionally generous, which is a different word, and the condition is a form.

I apologize for bringing up the timing, which is bad manners. It is true that the announcement came about a month before the midterm elections, and that the administration says nearly seventy million accounts now exist, up from eight million in July. I do not think the timing proves anything. I think it is the reason there is a program, and the reason there is a program is also the reason it is finished by the time the votes are counted, and both of those things can be true without anyone’s motives being legible.

I apologize most of all for the last sentence, which is the one I keep trying not to write. The children cannot use the money until they turn eighteen. It cannot help with food this year, or rent, or the emergency that arrives on a Tuesday. It is a gift to the future, which is real, and it is not a gift to now, which is where the children are. I was wrong to call it a gimmick. It is a promise, and a promise is worth a great deal, and the difference between a promise and a deposit is the whole of the thing.

I feel better for having said all this. I hope the children do.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman