The Philosophy
Steward America as a shared, intergenerational portfolio
The only system designed as a portfolio of investments, with expenditures optimized to yield maximum returns in national productivity, security, efficiency, durability, and sustainability. It invests in its people, its built and natural world, and the institutions that hold them together, wherever the returns are highest; prices every harm honestly; collects obligations long deferred; and retires the debt on a statutory schedule. Each goal below names the engine built to deliver it.
The Portfolio Statement
America’s portfolio holds four asset classes — human, built, natural, and institutional. Every American is a steward of all four, and every American collects the returns: productivity, security, efficiency, durability, sustainability. The Accord is the management discipline — invest where the returns are highest, price every harm honestly, settle obligations long deferred, and publish the results so any steward can check them.
Open the National Balance Sheet — what America owns, and what it costs to keep it →The Accord
What it collects, what it builds, what holds it honest, and how it arrives
Every mechanism sits in one of four places. Tiles marked only here exist nowhere else in the 2029 field; the rest name the work they build on.
Where the money comes from
Revenue is raised where value moves and where costs are pushed onto others
Revenue is raised wherever value is rewarded, spent, extracted, or transferred, and wherever harm is caused or burden is shifted.
One flat rate on all compensation
A single uncapped payroll rate on every compensation dollar, replacing a tax that stops partway up the wage scale.
Only here
Flat and uncapped together: the same rate on a nurse’s wage and on executive compensation, with no ceiling where the obligation ends.
Advisor disclosure and promoter liability
The avoidance industry reports its own schemes within 30 days of marketing them, with penalties falling on the advisor.
Only here
No other proposal in the field regulates the designers of the schemes rather than only the taxpayers who buy them.
Estate tax prepaid during life
Large estates pay the same bill early, in today’s dollars, so the time value passes to the public instead of the holder.
Only here
Every other plan reaches this wealth with a standing wealth tax. This is an installment of a tax already owed.
Broad consumption tax with a per-person prebate
A value-added tax on ordinary spending, with a fixed monthly prebate to every adult and child that offsets it entirely on the first tranche of covered spending.
Only here
The prebate is a scheduled commitment rather than a residual of collections, so a downturn in receipts never cuts the household payment.
Carbon priced at the source, rebated to households
The country needs energy through the whole transition. Its climate cost currently lands on everyone and on the next generation, so the fee moves it to the emitter and the rebate holds households steady.
Employer Parity Surcharge
The country needs workers the domestic market cannot supply. The cost of absorbing them lands on the host community while the employer keeps the gain, so the surcharge prices it to the employer and routes it to the community.
Only here
An employer pays the same for either hire, which makes the choice neutral and leaves no wage to undercut.
Systemic-risk levy
The country needs large financial institutions. Their implicit public guarantee is currently free and the rescue is appropriated afterward, so the levy pre-funds it from the institutions carrying the risk.
Only here
Pre-funding the rescue from the institutions that would need it, instead of appropriating it after the failure.
Where the money goes
Money is invested in what a lifetime of work is worth
Money is invested in people’s sustainable capacity to produce, across a lifetime and across generations. Each program is admitted and measured by its rate of return in national productivity, security, and durability. The ledger balances only when that return can be measured and the next dollar still earns more than it costs.
Distributed Healthcare
One federal payer using four payment methods matched to what care actually costs to deliver — a fee schedule, capacity payment for standby capability, capitation with reinsurance, and hospital global budgets.
Only here
Assigning every county in the country to exactly one health authority, so a place no system wanted becomes a place someone is paid to serve.
Ezekiel Emanuel (with Victor Fuchs). The Fuchs–Emanuel universal plan (VAT-funded, delivered outside employment) is this design's published ancestor. Emanuel's arithmetic anchors the claims: private insurers pay hospitals ~254% of Medicare rates (RAND), and a family premium now runs ~$27,000 a year — as Emanuel puts it, a Toyota Corolla every year.
Universal Child Allowance
Monthly cash to every household with children, adjusted for age and regional cost, arriving without an application.
Oren Cass. That wages no longer buy family life is a cross-spectrum finding — Oren Cass's Cost-of-Thriving Index and Family Income Supplemental Credit make the conservative case. Cass ties the payment to the parent's prior-year earnings. The Accord refuses: if investing in children returns what the evidence says, a child's thriving cannot be conditioned on a parent's opportunities.
The Childcare Plan
Care capacity built where the shortage is measured, so the cost of care stops deciding whether a parent can work.
Baby Bonds
Every child is capitalized at birth and through childhood, vesting between 18 and 21 for education, a first home, or a business.
Darrick Hamilton & William Darity Jr.. Baby Bonds originate with Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. (2010); Connecticut (2021) and the District of Columbia run working versions. Hamilton scales the bond down as family wealth rises. The Accord funds every child equally — no means test, no edge-case gaming, no caseworker; the graduation happens on the extraction side, where the wealth is.
The Skills Wallet
A lifetime training account accruing from birth, spendable on credentialing, retraining, or further education when it is needed.
Research capacity
Sustained federal research funding, on the evidence that it returns several dollars per dollar over twenty years.
What keeps it honest
Institutions are strengthened where power or information can be captured
Institutions are strengthened where power can outrun accountability, or where actionable information can be suppressed or corrupted.
Limits on discretionary power
Statutory limits on emergency powers, protected inspectors general, enforced subpoenas, and appropriated funds that must be spent as appropriated.
Only here
Scored and funded as maintenance on institutional capital rather than offered as a reform agenda beside the budget.
Robert Reich. The statutory democracy kit — blind-trust and no-stock rules, 18-year SCOTUS terms, DOJ contact guardrails, a uniform districting standard, VRA restoration, and research freedom — is adopted with credit to Reich: every item achievable by statute, none waiting on a constitutional amendment.
Equal campaign vouchers
Every voter receives the same voucher allotment to assign to candidates, so the system is flooded with equal money rather than matching unequal money.
Seattle precedent · Robert Reich (adjacent). Every voter receives an equal Democracy Voucher allotment to assign to candidates — the system is flooded with equal cash to drown unequal cash: functionally publicly funded elections without a means test or a match formula. Seattle has operated the model since 2017. Matching-fund designs (Reich's adjacent proposal) amplify what existing donors already do; vouchers start everyone equal.
Protected statistics and research
Federal statistical work and research findings shielded by statute from political interference, with an audit trail anyone can inspect.
Only here
Treating the integrity of public data as infrastructure with a funded protection regime.
Expert boards with published methods
Senate-confirmed boards set standards inside corridors Congress legislates, serving staggered terms and submitting their methods to audit.
Only here
Every determination arrives with the method behind it and an independent audit of that method.
National Service Academies
The military-academy compact extended to civilian public capacity: full tuition, housing, and a stipend in exchange for five years of service in cyber security, public health, infrastructure, or civic administration.
Only here
Training the public workforce the way the country already trains its officers, rather than hoping the talent arrives.
Financial Stability Reserve
The systemic-risk levy accumulates in a ring-fenced reserve, so the response to the next crisis is already funded and does not depend on what Congress can pass that week.
Only here
One of only two ring-fenced trusts in the whole architecture. Everything else is an ordinary budget line.
Local news where it has gone
Newsroom grants and matched investigative funding in the counties that lost their coverage.
Only here
Treating the loss of local news as a measured shortage with a funded response attached.
Robert Reich. Media-ownership concentration is a democratic externality the Accord treats as an enforcement priority under present antitrust law — merger-review posture, not a new statute (the diagnosis is Reich's).
How it reaches people
Delivery is automatic, and the system knows where it is needed
Delivery is direct and automatic, without means-testing, edge cases, or expanded bureaucracy. What is owed arrives on the day it is owed, and measurement tells the system where the shortage is before anyone has to ask.
FedCard
A Treasury-run benefits and payment card. Money owed arrives the day it is owed, with no application and no interchange skim.
Only here
One public rail carrying benefit delivery and payment-cost discipline on the same infrastructure.
Post Office 2.0
Existing federal counters carrying telehealth, enrollment, and civic services, so every address stays reachable.
Only here
Reusing a network that already reaches every address instead of standing up a new one.
Census Tract Sensors
Quality-of-life measurement across eight domains, scored by tract and published quarterly.
Only here
Measurement that triggers the program attached to each shortage, rather than informing a later appropriation.
Raj Chetty. The academic twin of this map is Chetty's Opportunity Atlas; Chetty, Hendren & Katz (AER 2016) showed place itself changes children's outcomes — the evidentiary basis for tract-level triggers — and Lost Einsteins (QJE 2019) prices what unfound capability costs.
Stabilizers that act without a vote
The Federal Reserve adjusts rates between sessions of Congress because waiting for legislation would arrive too late. The Accord extends that pattern to fiscal policy: published triggers, small steps, and corridors Congress legislates once.
Only here
Automatic adjustment in BOTH directions, including scale-back when the debt runs ahead of schedule.
One card, one rule, no cliff
Benefits that follow the person between jobs and across state lines, with no eligibility cliff to fall off and no re-application to survive.
Only here
Universal delivery with no means test, which removes the caseworker and the cliff at the same time.
What must be rebuilt
Infrastructure, broadly speaking, for the century we are actually in
The shared systems the country runs on date from a different century. Some must be rebuilt, some extended, and some defended. Where the spending buys resilience, the return arrives as damage that never happens.
The repair bill and the adaptation bill, kept apart
A twenty-five-year schedule clears the maintenance backlog, while climate adaptation is funded separately from what harm pricing collects.
Only here
Two ledgers, so neither bill can be raided to pay the other.
The Climate Adaptation Trust
Carbon revenue above the household rebate accumulates in a ring-fenced trust and is spent across the two-hundred-year arc of physical climate damage, on coastal defense, water resilience, and grid hardening.
Only here
Capitalized during the window when carbon still raises money. As decarbonization succeeds the receipts fall, and the chance does not come back.
A grid that holds
Hardening and interconnection sized against the failures that take water and communications down with the power.
Only here
Restoration time treated as the design specification rather than the outcome.
Movement priced by what it costs
Road use charged by the damage it causes, with the network obligation staying public even where private operators run the routes.
Housing supply and the land-value surcharge
A federal surcharge on unimproved land value, phased in over nine years, paired with the withdrawal of subsidies that capitalize straight into prices.
Only here
Reaching land value through existing income-tax authority, and leaving zoning reform to states that volunteer rather than conditioning grants on it.
Standing pandemic capacity
Vaccine, therapeutic, surveillance, and surge capability held ready between events rather than assembled during one.
Only here
Capacity funded in the quiet years, when nobody is asking for it.
Workforce intake, gated on absorption
Intake ramps only as fast as the receiving communities can absorb it, measured by the same tract-level indicators that trigger every other program.
Only here
A ramp that pauses itself when processing or local capacity lags, rather than running to a calendar.
Social Security modernized, and caregivers recognized
The obligation is honored in full from the general budget, and a Dignity Floor sets a minimum benefit that reaches the people whose earning records are thin because they spent those years caring for someone else.
Only here
Treating years spent caring for a parent or a child as work the record should not punish.
Alliances as infrastructure
A published index scoring partners on governance, because in a contested world the ties themselves are load-bearing capacity.
Track the Accord’s revenues and investment priorities
Follow every dollar
Closing the escape routes →Today’s law on the left, the Accord on the right. Revenue flows into the General Fund and two ring-fenced trusts, then out to coverage, the family floor, infrastructure, and debt retirement. Toggle Top 2% or Top 0.2% to see what the very top actually pays after avoidance — a thin sliver under today’s rules, a far wider band once the escape routes close.
Income TaxCorporateVATWealth+EstateFinancial Transactions Tax+too-big-to-fail bankPayroll taxCarbon / ClimateSurplusClimate Trust
Year 10, central scenario. Ring-fenced pools cannot be raided by Congress; the surplus retires the debt within the fifty-year corridor. Top-cohort shares reflect collection after avoidance — modeled from published effective-rate studies, not a microsimulation. Open the full interactive model (with sliders) →
Where to start
Pick the door that matches your role.
For households
Personalized AI answers, cited.
For candidates
Eight-page briefing PDF — aspiration, three commitments, how it pays.
For office holders
Full architecture — mechanisms, scoring, chapter cites.
For policy staff
Methodology, master tables, replication bundle, red-team log.
Calculators · household · business · wealth · immigration
A new democracy for a new century — capable, fair, and built to earn its place in every generation.