The $1,000 That Broke the Progressives’ Minds
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the comment Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made at yesterday’s Breitbart News policy event concerning the Trump administration’s new child savings accounts—specifically that they could become a “back door for privatizing Social Security.”
The Washington reaction to this was predictable: outrage from Democrats, amplification from the press, and an almost determined refusal to engage with what Bessent actually said.
“Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just said the quiet part out loud: The administration is scheming to privatize Social Security,” Tim Hogan, the Democratic National Committee’s senior adviser for messaging, mobilization and strategy, said in a statement. “Trump is now coming after American seniors with a ‘backdoor’ scam to take away the benefits they earned.”
Like glitched NPCs, Democrat lawmakers repeated the line almost word-for-word:
We could go on and on. The same line was repeated on X by Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) and Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA).
Their media algorithm also got stuck repeating the line. Here’s a ProPublica reporter and a retired Washington Post editor:
And here’s the NPC teacher’s union:
To Supplement, Not Replace
Of course, this was all an intentional misreading of Bessent’s comment. The Trump Accounts are not intended to replace Social Security but to supplement it. They make Social Security less important because they will increase the amount of wealth available for retirees, increasing the economic security of Americans.
Let’s do the math. Under the One Big Beautiful Law, every American newborn now receives a $1,000 Trump Account—a tax-deferred savings vehicle meant to grow with the child. If left untouched and earning the historical eight percent return of the S&P 500, that single deposit becomes $148,780 by age 65. Add in modest annual contributions—$200 a year starting at age 25—and the total grows to $204,736. If employers match both the initial contribution and the annual contribution—as Charter Communications and others have already announced they will—the account reaches $409,472.
That figure exceeds the lifetime Social Security benefits of a bottom-quartile income worker. It doesn’t replace Social Security, but it does something more subversive: it makes reliance on it unnecessary.
Bessent later clarified his comments. “This is not an either-or question,” he said. “The Trump Administration is committed to protecting Social Security and to making sure seniors have more money.”
This will not stop the Democrats and their flesh bots from repeating the lie, of course. They’ve been insisting that the Trump administration has a secret plan to abolish Social Security for years, undeterred by truth, logic, or President Trump’s many statements that he would never do any such thing.
It Was Once Their Idea Too
Ironically, the Democrats are attacking a program for which progressives advocated until just about the day before yesterday. The idea of giving every child a government-funded savings account began as a progressive proposal over a decade ago, when economists William Darity and Darrick Hamilton—both prominent voices on the economic left—outlined a plan for “baby bonds” as a tool to close the racial wealth gap. Their 2010 paper argued that capitalism without capital entrenches inequality, and they proposed publicly funded trust accounts for every newborn, with larger contributions for children from poorer families.
The funds would grow over time and be available at adulthood for wealth-building purposes like education, homeownership, or starting a business. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) later picked up the idea in Congress, introducing legislation to create “American Opportunity Accounts” funded annually on a sliding scale. That version was framed explicitly as a tool of wealth redistribution. What Bessent and the Trump administration have done is reframe the concept not as a form of reparative justice, but as a universal stake in the American economy, a patriotic nest egg that grows with the country’s prosperity.
This is sadly typical of public officials and former public intellectuals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. If Trump supports something, they will attack it. Sometimes just the whiff of Trump-affiliation or a wholly-imaginary connection—such as Sydney Sweeney’s advertisements for blue jeans—are enough to cause an eruption of TDS boils on the body of left politics.
The Golden Era Is Coming
Beyond the acute attack of TDS, Democrats had another reason to seize on Bessent’s remarks: they didn’t want to talk about the rest of what he said at yesterday’s Breitbart policy event. Throughout his interview with our Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle, Bessent offered a sweeping case for the strength of the Trump economy and the failures of the Biden administration and the Democrat policies it followed.
He highlighted the deep harm caused by inflation under President Biden, particularly for working-class Americans, and contrasted it with the rebound under Trump. He pointed to rising real wages, falling inflation, and unexpectedly strong growth—three percent in the second quarter—as evidence that the economy is outperforming mainstream expectations.
On the Federal Reserve, Bessent took aim at what he sees as stale thinking and an unwillingness to adapt to the new environment. He accused central bankers of suffering from “Tariff Derangement Syndrome,” a mindset that led them to misread the inflationary impact of trade policy. Rather than destabilize prices, Trump’s tariffs have coincided with falling inflation, contradicting conventional forecasts. Bessent called on the Fed to use “a little imagination” and warned that backward-looking models risk holding back a productivity boom.
That boom, he argued, is already underway. Citing provisions in the One Big Beautiful Law—particularly full expensing for capital investments—Bessent described a “capex comeback” and a broader reindustrialization push. “We want America to be able to build again,” he said, praising efforts to revive domestic manufacturing and streamline permitting.
He also turned his attention to China, saying the country is “on their heels” as global manufacturing realigns and U.S. trade leadership regains momentum. Pointing to trade deals with the EU, Japan, and Vietnam, Bessent said, “The world is now with us.” China, he insisted, would not be granted “a special deal.”
The economy isn’t just growing—it’s growing in the right places: wages, investment, production, and private savings. The foundations of dependency—on the Fed, on China, on entitlements—are being slowly replaced by something more stable and more resilient. As Bessent has frequently said, the Trump administration is re-privatizing and reindustrializing the economy, and it is benefiting Americans who were left behind by years of the twin growth of Wall Street influence and government power.
“We’re making everyone a stakeholder,” he said.
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