What did Donald Trump do today?

He got a little confused about how non-billionaires save their money.

Today, Trump signed an executive order that he claimed would give Americans access to a new "low-cost IRA" via a website he branded after himself: trumpira.gov.

IRAs, or individual retirement accounts, are a way to incentivize retirement savings by providing tax breaks. Individuals can invest a certain amount of their income each year in an investment account. That money isn't subject to the normal federal income tax, so there's an immediate tax savings. The proceeds can be withdrawn after the investor reaches age 59½. 

Of course, anyone can already open an IRA for free. Financial services companies like Fidelity, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, and others already offer free accounts with access to a variety of standard funds with expense ratios considerably lower than the 0.15% limit set by Trump's order.

The program Trump's order concerns does have some genuine benefits for Americans looking to save for retirement. For one thing, it matches contributions up to $1,000 per year for American workers with low household incomes. The median American household only has $87,000 in retirement savings, so that kind of incentive could do a lot of good. Up to 22 million Americans stand to see their retirement cushion increased by this provision.

What Trump didn't mention is that this benefit, known as the "Saver's Match," comes from a 2022 law signed by President Biden. Another thing Trump didn't mention is that he'd already shut down a program allowing for (genuinely) low-cost retirement investments administered by the federal government, the MyRA account, that the Obama administration unveiled in 2015.

Trump's confusion about the "costs" associated with IRAs is probably because he's never had to worry about anything so pedestrian as shielding a few thousand dollars from income taxes. He is a multibillionaire whose tax strategy is a little more unorthodox: he flagrantly breaks the law and dares anyone to do anything about it. Before he started getting serious about monetizing the presidency with open solicitation of bribes and crypto rug-pull scams, Trump could have benefited from a program like the one he touted today: as many people have noted, he'd have been wealthier for most of his life by simply putting his half-billion-dollar inheritance in an index fund, rather than repeatedly running real estate ventures into the ground.
 

Why does this matter?

• Putting your name on something you didn't build is very Trump, but it's also the kind of cheap propaganda you normally only see in petty dictatorships. 

• It's bad if presidents don't have any frame of reference for what someone who actually needs to think about saving for retirement might want.