Of Our Present Ability, and What Is to Be Done

Paine devoted his fourth section to a question his critics thought decisive: granted that independence is right, can America actually manage it? He answered with arithmetic. He counted the ships. He priced out a navy, tallied the timber and the iron and the tar, and demonstrated on paper that the thing could be built.

I intend to do the same, and I will start where he started: with the question of whether any of this is achievable, because that objection has been thrown at every reform proposal in my lifetime.

The answer is that much of it is already happening

Several of these ideas are not hypothetical. They are law, or they were moving through Congress with support from both parties as I wrote this in August of 2026.

Seeded investment accounts exist in federal law. Children born from 2025 through 2028 receive a $1,000 federal seed in an investment account, with room for family contributions; more than six million accounts have been reported open.¹⁴ It is a partial vehicle, a savings supplement for a limited cohort, not the retirement redesign I will propose. But the machinery now exists, enacted by a Republican administration and built with private investors.

Federal student lending is now tied to outcomes. A law passed in 2025 applies an earnings test to nearly every degree program in American higher education: a program whose completers cannot out-earn comparable adults who never attended loses access to federal loans. The test took effect on July 1, 2026.

A ban on congressional stock trading is live and bipartisan. Senators Hawley and Ossoff, who agree on virtually nothing else, are on the same bill.

A bill to end government shutdowns permanently is live and bipartisan. Senators Lankford and Hassan, joined by Crapo and Blackburn, would keep funding flowing automatically at prior-year levels when Congress misses its deadline, and require members to stay in Washington until they finish.¹⁵

Nonpartisan primaries are already running in California and Washington (Louisiana ran a version for half a century before switching back to party primaries in 2026), and Iowa has drawn its maps without political data since 1980, through nonpartisan staff who are forbidden to look at election results, party registration, or where the incumbents live.

So the question is not whether these things are possible. They are. The question is which ones move and which ones die, and that turns out to be the most instructive thing in this entire pamphlet.

Now look at what got cut

The student-loan law originally made colleges share the losses. If a school’s program left graduates unable to repay, the school would bear part of the cost, which is the only provision that would actually change institutional behavior. It was written. It was debated. The Senate stripped it out. What survived was a test that punishes students’ choices and leaves the institutions untouched.

The stock-trading bill passed the House in a form that lets members sell what they already own, which is to say, it addresses the appearance and not the substance.

The border deal died when its own author voted against it.

Do you see it? The measures that pass are the ones that cost nobody their leverage. The measures that get stripped, weakened, or killed are the ones that take leverage away from the people holding the vote.

Four demonstrations in eighteen months. I did not have to theorize any of this. I had only to read the legislative record.

And here is what nobody has proposed

I want to be equally honest about the thing that has not happened, because it is the heart of the fiscal argument and it would be easy to overclaim.

The seeded accounts are a fine thing, and they are a supplement bolted onto a system that is otherwise unchanged. Social Security remains what it was: pay-as-you-go, unreformed, running short in 2032. A thousand dollars at birth does not alter that arithmetic in any way.

What I am proposing is different in kind, and nobody in American politics has seriously argued for it since 2005: that for people young enough to plan around it, participating in the growth of the American economy should become the primary way one retires, with public insurance as the floor underneath rather than the whole of it.

The machinery to do this now exists. The argument for it has not been made.

The three repairs

Everything I have described comes down to three changes. I state them plainly and then say what each side gets, because if a reform cannot be sold to both halves of the country it will be repealed by whichever half did not get it.

A fair reader will notice that only the first of these three is about how government works, and that the other two are ordinary policy. Why are they here? Two reasons.

People vote their fears, and these are the two largest. A border nobody controls and an old age nobody can afford are precisely what make a citizen willing to back the candidate who promises never to give an inch. New rules take a decade to settle into habit; if those two fears burn the whole time, the rules will be torn up before they take hold.

And these two are the proof. I have asserted that deals exist in which both sides win at once. That is easy to assert. So take the two hardest cases in American life, the angriest and the most expensive, where a bargain has sat in plain view for twenty years. Close them, and no one can tell me the rest cannot be done.