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........

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