Watch live: Trump participates in Trump Accounts launch; NYSE, Nasdaq bell ringing

Ringing the opening bell from the White House is a bit of stagecraft, sure, but the underlying idea is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Trump Accounts, seeded for kids and left to grow in the market for years before they can touch them, are a bet that compound growth beats a government check every time. That's not nothing. A generation of kids starting adulthood with an actual investment history instead of just a Social Security number is a genuinely different starting point.

Skeptics will say this is a gimmick timed to a photo op with NYSE and Nasdaq brass standing behind the president. Maybe. But the mechanism matters more than the ceremony. These accounts put money into equities early and let time do the work, which is precisely the kind of ownership stake in the economy that past "give people cash" programs never bothered to build.

The real test isn't the bell-ringing, it's whether Washington leaves these accounts alone for the next eighteen years. Programs like this tend to get raided, means-tested, or "reformed" into mush the moment a new administration wants the money for something else. If this survives that instinct, it could actually change how a generation thinks about ownership instead of dependency.