Ted Cruz says the quiet part out loud: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts as GOP senator reveals “dirty little secret”
Source: fortune
Ted Cruz says the quiet part out loud: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts as GOP senator reveals “dirty little secret”
Source: fortune
21 Comments
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz suggested the so-called Trump accounts for American children are part of an effort to revamp Social Security, a sensitive political subject long regarded as the “third rail” in U.S. politics.
Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created allowed parents and other authorized individuals to open tax-advantaged savings accounts for any child under 18 with a Social Security number.
During a panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s Global Summit on Monday, Cruz pointed out he wrote that part of the legislation, noting that half of Americans don’t own stocks and can’t benefit from decades of compounding growth.
For 50 years, he added, U.S. conservatives have been trying to mimic Australia’s superannuation program, which requires employers to pay into an employee’s investment fund to be accessed upon retirement as a way to reduce reliance on public pensions. Cruz described a U.S. version as Social Security personal accounts.
“Here’s the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts,” he said.
Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: [https://fortune.com/2026/05/09/ted-cruz-trump-accounts-social-security-payroll-taxes-entitlements-us-debt/?utm_source=reddit/](https://fortune.com/2026/05/09/ted-cruz-trump-accounts-social-security-payroll-taxes-entitlements-us-debt/?utm_source=reddit/)
Why is there even a “Milken Institute “?
Michael Milken’s rotten tactics with junk bonds earned him 22 months in prison for securities fraud.
When I was younger I actually believed that republicans were the fiscally conservative party. As I grew older and wiser I realized that perception was completely wrong. Republicans are not fiscally conservative. They just brand the stuff they want to spend money on as conservative values and their braindead supporters eat that shit up.
Universal health care and universal education (including college) are actually more fiscally conservative policies than anything the republicans stand for. In the long run these types of initiatives save and generate far more money than they cost. Certainly a better return for the dollar than maintaining the largest military in the world by several orders of magnitude. A military rendered largely irrelevant when our main adversaries can just nuke us.
With the way things are going in the US, 1.9 million will be a drop in the bucket in 28 years.
Wait till they find out Trump’s grubby little hands can loot it at any time, and then they change the terms of service.
The idea that everyone needs to have capital, and therefore own a portion of the means or production, is a rather socialist idea. The harsh reality is that labor isn’t going to magically keep up with capital but labor is the primary way most people earn income and ideally wealth. SS is expensive and not that great of a deal for those relying on it. The one thing it has going for it is that it has been reliable, but it has been underfunded so that may not last.
GOP want to assure that GOV”T has no part in helping American Citizens – let along foreign workers – the FED concern based on the workers tax bracket. They seriously want a redo of the Hoover Administration.
>The [White House has estimated](https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/12/landmark-dell-gift-supercharges-trump-accounts-for-americas-kids/) that fully funded Trump accounts could eventually grow to as much as $1.9 million by the time a child turns 28.
Holy inflated numbers batman
MAGA wants private companies to hold all our money, personal information, etc.
This is BAD because private companies can hide (Trump is proof of this) their ill intentions, security flaws, etc while Americans are getting screwed financially, professionally, and personally. You think ad spamming is bad now? Try giving up everything to private companies who incentivize it. 💁♂️
I never see anyone talk about how these accounts are going to count as liquid resources for the purpose of snap and welfare applications. A generation of children will be categorically ineligible.
Not a bad idea, except they are IRA accounts, not social security. I am going to max out my daughters accounts every single year from now until they don’t allow me to contribute.
They also, should allow these to be Roth accounts, as all the money being put into them is post tax.
Every big business tries to use the credit markets to get out of its expensive financial guarantees (performance and/or payment guarantees of subsidiaries, oil well plugging and abandonment responsibility, etc.), usually looking to pay the the Surety market to take the risk off their hands.
The average conservative voter’s fantasy about the privatization of SS is all about higher market returns.
The average conservative politician’s fantasy about the privatization is the removal of the government guarantee of future SS payments. This is the same de-risking financial motivation as the large corporations but the politicians add in the fantasy of private market, crony, self-dealing on admin fees.
Doesn’t this have to go through congress?
Ted Cruz is a perfectly normal human being, and not an easy answer to the trolley problem. Like all perfectly normal human beings it would hurt his feelings to be run over by a train and have his reproductive budding process kick-started against his will like that.
When that vile man dies or finally goes to prison we must prioritize removing his foul name everywhere it has stained this once great nation.
Other than the initial $ paid from the US government into these accounts, what exactly is the difference between this account and any other account that you can open at any brokerage firm?
All of this assumes a market that goes forever-up when we’re in the midst of a gigantic speculative investment bubble in AI. If AI doesn’t completely transform the world and become wildly popular as a consumer product, then all of this goes up in smoke. Consider how much the internet changed the world and we still had a speculative crash in response to that. LLM-based AI Costs 20 times as much and does not seem poised to be nearly as lucrative. Good luck somehow generating 1.8 million on a crashing stock market, guys.
Cool cool. Stock market collapse at age 78? Back to work you begger!
Have you tried raising VAT and killing the poor?
The epstine class and trump see America as their own Toys R US and they’re Bain Capitol
Please stop using this stupid title every time a Republican speaks. They use it almost every day now. It’s not clever and everyone knows no one cares about the “quiet part” anymore.