A Nest Egg for Every Kid, From Day One
In 2025, the federal government did something genuinely new: it began seeding a tax-advantaged investment account with $1,000 for every American child born between 2025 and 2028, letting families add up to $5,000 a year on top, growing tax-deferred until the child turns eighteen. It's a good idea, a real head start on homeownership, education, or a first business, arriving before a child can even walk.
It's also, right now, a four-year pilot instead of a permanent promise, and it requires a parent to actively file the right paperwork to claim it. We propose making it permanent and universal: every American child, born every year going forward, automatically enrolled at birth, so no family misses out simply because they didn't know the form existed.
Wealth in this country has always compounded fastest for kids whose families already had some. A nest egg that starts at birth, for every child, is one of the most direct ways to change whose money gets forty years to grow instead of twenty.
Editorial note: The source draft for this section was noticeably shorter than the others and flagged "expand here." I'd suggest adding one concrete example before this goes live — e.g., what $1,000 plus modest annual contributions realistically grows to by 18 at a typical rate of return.
A Child Tax Credit That Reaches Every Family
The federal Child Tax Credit now stands at $2,200 per child, permanently, and adjusts with inflation going forward, a real improvement, and a rare piece of family policy that survived a change in political fashion. But the credit still phases in slowly for the lowest-earning working families, which means some of the parents working hardest to make ends meet see the least benefit from a credit meant to help exactly them.
We propose fixing the phase-in so a full-time working parent gets the full credit regardless of how modest their paycheck is, paired with an expanded childcare tax credit that actually keeps pace with what childcare costs today rather than what it cost when the credit was last seriously updated. Raising a child is expensive in the exact years when most parents are earning the least they ever will; the credit should show up when it's needed, not phase in like a reward for already having made it.
A tax credit only works as family policy if the families who need it most can actually reach it.
Paid Family Leave: Ending the Patchwork
Whether a new parent gets paid time off to bond with a newborn, or an adult child gets paid time off to care for a dying parent, currently depends almost entirely on which state line they happen to live behind. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have built real, working paid family leave systems, but there is still no federal floor, and only about one in four private-sector workers in America has access to paid leave at all.
We propose a national paid family leave standard, modeled directly on the programs already running successfully in more than a dozen states: a guaranteed minimum number of paid weeks for a new child or a seriously ill family member, funded the way the most successful state programs already fund it, so employers aren't competing against each other over who can avoid offering it.
No parent should have to choose between a paycheck and their newborn's first weeks of life because of a map. This is one of the last major economic protections most of the developed world already has and America still doesn't.
Saving Social Security for the Generation Paying Into It
Every young worker paying into Social Security today is funding a promise that, on the program's current trajectory, may not be fully kept by the time they collect it. The system's retirement trust fund is now projected to run short in 2032, and even combined with the disability trust fund, the money runs out by 2034, years, not decades, away. Absent action from Congress, benefits would then face an automatic cut of as much as a quarter for everyone drawing them, including the people in their twenties and thirties paying into the system right now.
This isn't a distant, abstract problem for young people to worry about later; the workers facing the biggest lifetime impact are the ones just starting their careers today. We should fix this now, while there's still time to do it gradually rather than in a panic: protect the benefits already earned by people at or near retirement, and build a durable, bipartisan fix for the long-term program that today's twenty- and thirty-year-olds will actually retire into.
Kicking this can down the road has been a bipartisan habit for twenty years. The young workers funding the program today are the ones who will pay the price for one more decade of delay.You didn’t come this far to stop
