Image by Avinash Kumar.

America loves a good illusion. It loves the performance of generosity from people who built their fortunes on systems that leave everyone else scrambling. That’s why the country is celebrating Michael and Susan Dell dropping $6.25 billion into “Trump Accounts.” Twenty-five million kids will get $250 each in a special savings account that they can’t touch for almost two decades. It sounds like generosity. It plays like hope. It sells like opportunity. But it isn’t any of that. It’s a corporate heist dressed up as philanthropy, and America is too exhausted or too desperate to notice.

The Dell announcement isn’t about helping children. It’s about normalizing a future where the only people who can fix failing systems are the same corporations and billionaires who helped break them. The government could’ve built real support for families. It could’ve raised wages, stabilized housing, funded public education, or given parents actual resources instead of symbolic ones. Instead it built a program where kids get locked into market accounts, and then it waited for a billionaire to swoop in and finish the job. That isn’t policy. It isn’t progress. It’s the privatization of the public good.

A one-time $250 deposit isn’t lifting anyone out of anything. At best it turns children into unwilling investors in a financial system that’s already eaten their parents alive. At worst it shifts the entire idea of welfare into something that only functions if wealthy people feel like playing savior for a news cycle. This isn’t social support. It’s a handshake between private wealth and a government that no longer knows how to govern unless the market approves.

The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.

The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.

There’s also the quiet financialization happening underneath. These accounts invest in index funds. That means millions of new dollars flowing into the same corporate structures that already dominate the economy. Kids become passive capital generators before they can read. Their “gift” enriches the very companies that helped create the inequality this program is pretending to solve. It’s a perfect loop. The wealthy get to look generous while reinforcing the machine that made them wealthy. The public gets a story about hope. The corporations get the money.

The cruelty of it is that it works. It works because people are tired. Everything’s expensive. Everything feels unstable. Families will take whatever crumbs show up because the alternative is nothing. They’re told this is opportunity. They’re told this is investment. They’re told this is how you get ahead. They don’t ask why a country with the wealth of America is giving children numbers in an account instead of conditions they can survive.

The real collapse is right here. It looks like a billionaire being framed as a public institution. It looks like a government outsourcing its responsibilities to private wealth and calling it innovation. It looks like children being turned into financial products. It looks like the normalization of scarcity. It looks like the public begging for symbolic solutions because no one can imagine real ones anymore.

This isn’t generosity. It isn’t progress. It isn’t a path out of inequality. It’s the same old ownership playing out in a new costume. A billionaire writes a check, the headlines glow, the markets smile, and everyone pretends it’s a step forward. But look at the scale of the theft underneath. Look at the stories we tell ourselves to avoid saying the truth out loud. A country that expects billionaires to fund children has already chosen its future. It’s a future where the public good is a privilege and every solution is a product. It’s a future designed to keep people grateful for scraps.

The Dells aren’t giving children a head start. They’re giving everyone a warning. This is what it looks like when a nation forgets how to take care of its own people and starts handing the responsibility to the highest bidder.

The post The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed