Every child: $25,000 to the parents, $25,000 into trust

Children are the simplest case for a universal income and the one most often designed badly. The 2021 expansion of the child tax credit, paid monthly, cut child poverty by about a third in the months it ran³, and the cut reversed the month it ended. The lesson is that a steady, unconditional payment to parents works, and that anything conditional or temporary does not. This piece makes the payment permanent and adds a second half that most designs leave out.

Two halves

To the parents. Half the adult amount per child, capped at $25,000 a year, deposited weekly to the parents' account. In 2027, with the adult payment at about $22,600, that is about $11,300 per child, which is roughly what a middle-income family spends on a child today². By 2042, when the adult payment reaches $52,000, the cap binds and every child's parents receive $25,000. The payment follows the child, not the household structure; divorced parents split it as the custody order says.

Into trust. The same amount again, into the Trust Fund's foreign holdings (piece 4). It is pooled: no child has an account, a balance or a statement. What the child gets is the adult payment from the day they turn 18, funded by a fund that their childhood deposits helped build. Routing the child deposits abroad does two jobs: it keeps the domestic share under the cap, and it means that a generation's claim on capital is diversified across the world rather than tied to the U.S. market alone.

Why pooled

Per-child accounts are the fashionable design, and the 2025 child savings accounts⁴ are a version of it. We reject them for the same reasons given in piece 4. Individual accounts compound differently for different children depending on when they were born and what the market did, so they create inequality by birth year. They need 73 million statements and a customer-service operation. They can be borrowed against, mis-sold, and lost. And a lump sum at 18 is the worst-timed money in a person's life: large enough to be dangerous, too small to matter for long. A pooled trust gives every adult the same claim for life. The child's deposits are a contribution to the commons they will draw from, not a savings account with their name on it.

What it costs the pool

Child trust deposits are $820 billion in 2027 and $1.83 trillion in 2045; the parents' half is the same again. Together the children's leg is about a fifth of what the pool pays out. The model treats the trust deposit as leaving the pool, so it reduces the adult payment one-for-one in the year it is made, and it returns through the fund draw from 2036. That is the honest accounting: the trust half is a transfer from today's adults to tomorrow's, and the series says so rather than pretending it is free.

What is not decided

Whether a child's payment should be conditional on anything (school attendance, vaccination) is a question the design answers no, on the evidence that conditions are where programs fail and families fall through. Whether the trust half should begin at birth or at conception, how a child who arrives as an immigrant is treated, and whether the parents' half should taper above the $300,000 household threshold are open. We note that the parents' half is income to the parents and counts toward their threshold under the design in piece 3.