The whole system, animated: 2027 to 2060

Eleven pieces, eleven mechanisms. This page puts them in one picture. Each box is explained in its own helper text; each flow is sized by the master model for the year you choose; the dots move in proportion to the dollars. Today's dollars, trillions unless marked.

The system in one paragraph

Income, corporate and other taxes are withheld by banks in real time and swept to the Public Income Pool. The central bank credits new money to the pool, sized to real growth above 2 percent. From 2036 the Trust Fund adds a draw. Out of the pool come the lean federal budget, the local essentials grant, the banks' fee and the children's trust deposits; everything else goes back through the banks to every adult as a weekly deposit, with a child's half to the parents. Large companies deliver 2.5 percent of their value a year in non-voting shares, which banks hold for the Trust Fund until the fund owns a third of the market; anything above 30 percent is sold into foreign assets. Landowners pay a land value tax through their bank, three quarters to schools and a quarter to local government. Banks put half their fee into new housing as first-loss equity. Data centers pay 12 cents a kilowatt-hour into a power fund that pays household electric bills. A fixed $1 trillion line services and then retires the federal debt.

Rules worth keeping

Whatever else changes, the design depends on these: nothing goes from the pool to households except through a bank; new money is credited to the pool and never exceeds real output growth less 2 percent; the levy pauses at 33 percent fund ownership and domestic holdings above 30 percent are sold into foreign assets; the fund is pooled, with no individual accounts and no inheritance; housing works down the ladder (supportive homes with services, then the shortage, then retrofits and regions); tenants never need to own; local money stays local.

Rollout, easiest first

Winners and losers

Winners: low- and middle-income households; people in care, trades and human services; small-business founders; tech-forward banks; AI and technology companies (a stable, growing customer base and a known levy instead of an open-ended fight); retirees, at $52,000 against about $24,000 of average Social Security today; low-cost regions and data-center regions.

Losers: payday lenders, collectors, subprime lenders and overdraft fees (their customers have money); tax preparation (95 percent of people file nothing); traditional insurers and billing middlemen; benefit bureaucracies and legacy defense contractors; large passive fortunes and land speculators (who lose share, and still grow); employers who relied on desperate workers; routine office and retail workers, who are displaced and cushioned. The design names its losers because a plan that claims to have none is lying about something.

Four political paths

A strong-AI economy does not automatically produce this system. We see four paths. Concentration: the owners of AI and compute keep the income, and the rest of the country lives on what trickles down. Broad sharing, the Nordic-style path this series models. Backlash: displacement without sharing produces nationalization pressure, and the state ends up owning the machines by force rather than by levy, which is the 96 percent outcome from piece 4 by another road. And a decentralized, AI-assisted libertarian democracy, where the rails exist but the pool is small and people organize the rest themselves. Whichever path, the models that run the system must be open, auditable, citizen-directed and overridable; a universal income administered by a formula nobody can read is a different kind of concentration. Campaign finance (at least $15.9 billion in the 2024 cycle⁷) is not modeled, and it is the force most likely to decide which path we take. Democracy vouchers could run on the same bank rails as the deposit; that is a piece for another day.

What is still open

For the design: should the debt line rise by about $150 billion early to end borrowing at launch? Where does the health catastrophic cap sit? Who is eligible: citizens, permanent residents, new arrivals, and when? How does Medicare transition? Does the universal income count toward the $150,000 threshold (we model yes)? Is the small-business threshold revenue or profit? Who funds the K-12 gap the land tax does not cover? How do 401(k)s and pensions fit? For the model: add the mobility fund and the education streams; add transportation to the inflation model; rerun the wealth simulation on the final model; build the 2 percent growth downside properly, with displacement and without the growth. For the risks: a downside AI scenario run only early; data-center load growing 8 percent a year; cybersecurity and identity fraud when banks handle everything; market repricing when a permanent levy is announced; state taxes that conflict with the tax-free promise; zoning as the housing bottleneck; CRA box-checking; the military-industrial transition.

The series

1. The $52,000 target, and why it takes a ramp
2. Banks as the rails
3. Progressive taxes on all income, with a tax-free life under $150,000
4. A share levy into a stock-owning Trust Fund, capped at a third
5. Growth-matched new money
6. A land value tax for schools and local government
7. Every child: $25,000 to the parents, $25,000 into trust
8. The housing engine
9. Free household electricity from a data-center power fund
10. A lean federal government and the debt line
11. What happens to work, wealth and prices