Trump’s “baby investor” plan lands at the collision point between desperation and opportunity. For families who have never owned a stock, the idea that their child might turn 18 with a stake in the market feels like a door finally opening. Not a trust fund, not a lottery ticket—just a small, humming engine of compounding that started the day they were born. But the same mechanism that can build wealth can also betray it, and that uncertainty is the heart of the unease.

Because this isn’t just about accounts; it’s about a generation raised on debt, gig work, and vanishing stability. The proposal forces a question the country has dodged: if the old promise no longer works, what replaces it? Whether these accounts ever exist, they expose a choice. America can keep telling the same story—or admit it needs to write a different one.