That Super Bowl ad ran a few weeks ago. "Free money for every American baby." Trump Accounts. $1,000 deposited into an investment account for every kid born in the US, plus parents can add up to $5,000 a year. The money goes into a fund that tracks the stock market.

My daughter saw the ad and asked if she was getting free money. I said probably not — she's 13, not a newborn. She was annoyed. Fair enough.

But the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Not because it's a bad idea on the surface. Giving kids a head start on investing sounds great. The problem is what they're investing in.

The fund tracks the overall stock market. Denominated in dollars. The same dollars that have lost 25% of their purchasing power since my daughter was born in 2012. The same dollars that the government can print whenever it needs to fund the next emergency, bailout, or war. They're giving kids "free money" in a currency they're actively devaluing.

It's like giving someone a gift card to a store that raises its prices 7% every year. After 18 years, that $1,000 might be worth $3,000 in nominal terms and buy less than $1,000 buys today. You haven't built wealth. You've run on a treadmill.

I set up a different account for my kids. A Lightning wallet. No minimum age. No government deciding when they can access it. No fund manager taking a cut. Just sats. My son has about 1,200 and my daughter has a few hundred. It's not much in dollar terms. But the supply is capped at 21 million. Nobody's printing more because the debt ceiling needs to go up again.

I'm not against the Trump Accounts. A savings vehicle for kids who otherwise wouldn't have one is genuinely useful. But let's not pretend it solves the underlying problem, which is that the unit of measurement keeps shrinking.

My kids will have both. One account that the government controls. One that nobody controls. We'll see which one actually holds value by the time they're 30.