Trump Accounts

Trump Accounts & American Income Inequality The wealth gap is a big political issue for Americans. According to a Gallup poll held in March, half of the country worries “a great deal” about how income and wealth are distributed. Perhaps that’s because about the same share of the population doesn’t have the resources to afford all the basics, like housing, food, medicine and healthcare. The winner-takes-all AI economy has only exacerbated these concerns. That’s one reason that Donald Trump rang the bell for both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq at the White House last week to promote his new “Trump accounts”. These would give every child born between January 2025 and December 2028 a one-time $1,000 Treasury contribution, as a way of, as Trump put it in his press conference, making a lot of kids “very, very rich”. Will it? In a word, no. With a 5 per cent real annual return, that $1,000 would be $2,400 by the time the child is 18. Nice, but by no means transformative. Still, the fact that even Trump (who has done his personal best to increase the wealth gap in America) is concerned about the issue confirms the larger debate in the US over what some political theorists and economists call the “pre-distribution” as opposed to the “redistribution” of wealth — at a time when inequality is greater than it has been since the Gilded Age. https://archive.is/rLqXl#selection-1441.0-1817.526 PG