A lean federal government and the debt line
A universal income does not sit on top of the existing government; it replaces most of it. Piece 2 listed the transfer programs that fold into the weekly deposit. This piece is about what remains, and about the one line in the budget that never changes: the debt line.
The lean budget
The design starts from a federal budget of about $5 trillion after the replaced programs are removed, and cuts it to $3.05 trillion in 2027, holding it near $3 trillion in today's dollars through 2045 while the economy more than doubles. Here is what stays.
| Line | 2027 | 2045 | Why it stays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health public option | $0.60T | $0.43T | A public plan anyone can buy, with a hard cap on what a household under the threshold can be charged in a year. Falls 2 percent a year from 2030 as AI cuts delivery cost (piece 11). |
| Extreme disability and long-term care | $0.30T | $0.22T | Needs that $52,000 does not cover. |
| Veterans' health | $0.10T | $0.07T | A promise already made. |
| Military | $0.45T | $0.54T | Low-cost, high-impact: smaller, more automated, fewer legacy programs. Grows 1 percent a year. |
| Debt service line | $1.00T | $1.00T | Fixed in real terms. Pays interest; the rest pays principal. |
| Infrastructure | $0.15T | $0.18T | Roads, grid, water, transit. |
| Science | $0.10T | $0.12T | Basic research the machine economy will not fund on its own. |
| Courts, emergencies, diplomacy, oversight | $0.35T | $0.42T | The state's irreducible functions, including the auditors this series keeps asking for. |
Health is the hard case. National health spending is $5.7 trillion2, and a $600 billion public option does not replace it; it sits inside it as the floor. Households buy care with their universal income and the public option is the plan that cannot refuse them, with a catastrophic cap so that no household under the threshold can be ruined by a diagnosis. Where the cap sits, and how Medicare transitions, are open questions the design does not yet answer. The budget line falls over time because the model assumes AI cuts the cost of health delivery by 30 percent by 2045 (paperwork, billing, diagnostics), and that is an assumption worth arguing with.
The debt line
The federal debt is not forgiven, inflated away or defaulted on. One line of $1 trillion a year, fixed in today's dollars, pays interest on the $32.4 trillion held by the public3 at 3.5 percent. In 2027 interest is about $1.13 trillion, so the line falls short by $134 billion and the Treasury borrows that much. As inflation at 2 percent raises the nominal value of the fixed line and the real debt shrinks, the shortfall closes: borrowing shrinks to about zero by 2034, and the line pays down $15 billion in 2035, $226 billion in 2045, and $608 billion in 2060. Debt held by the public goes from 108 percent of GDP to 30 percent by 2045 and 7 percent by 2060, because the economy grows 5 percent a year while the debt barely moves. Raise the line by $150 billion in the early years and borrowing ends at launch, at a cost of about $450 per adult; that is one of the open questions.
The health line in the model starts at $1.0T (the public option plus disability, long-term and veterans' care together) and falls 2 percent a year from 2030.
Who loses
This is the piece where the losers are concrete: benefit bureaucracies, tax preparers, billing middlemen, traditional insurers, and legacy defense contractors. The design does not pretend they are not losers. It argues that a government which pays every adult directly does not need most of the apparatus that decided who deserved what, and that the people who staffed that apparatus receive the same $52,000 as everyone else, with the same freedom to do something more useful with their time. Military restructuring over a decade is listed among the hardest steps of the rollout, after the money agreement, because the transition is industrial and regional as much as fiscal.
Sources
- The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 — Congressional Budget Office · original · baseline federal outlays by category, about $7 trillion including the income-security programs the universal income replaces; the $5 trillion starting point excludes them. Not yet locked.
- National Health Expenditure Data — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services · original · $5.7 trillion national health spending in 2025, the pool the public option sits inside. Not yet locked.
- Debt to the Penny; Monthly Statement of the Public Debt — U.S. Department of the Treasury, Fiscal Data · original · about $40 trillion gross and $32.4 trillion held by the public at the 2027 start, at an average 3.5 percent interest. Not yet locked.
- Monthly debt update, October 2026 — Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress · original · Not yet locked.
Numbered references in the text point to this list. "Locked" means we hold a dated copy of the file on the PLACES platform so the figure can be checked later even if the publisher changes the page.