The objections, and what I say to them

A man who publishes his arguments and not the arguments against them is not reasoning; he is advertising. I have collected the strongest objections I know of, including some I have not fully answered, and I put them here so that a reader may judge the case rather than the salesman. The complete set, with the technical detail, lives in the companion volume, Fix the System: Policy Design and Implementation. These are the ones the public argument cannot do without.

”You are adding procedure to a government that is already dying of procedure.”

The most intelligent objection, and I have not entirely defeated it. Every mechanism I propose is a new handle, and a new handle is a thing a determined minority can seize. My answer is that not all procedure is alike. There is procedure that creates the ability to stop things, and procedure that creates the obligation to decide. Nearly everything strangling American government is the first kind; what I propose is the second: a bill must be voted on, a budget must be passed, failure has a date attached. But the distinction is cleaner in a pamphlet than it will be in a statute, and the people who draft statutes do this for a living and I do not.

”Your immediate election requires amending the Constitution.”

Correct, and I said so where I proposed it, because it is the largest practical problem in the whole document. House terms are fixed at two years by Article One; the Senate’s at six by the Seventeenth Amendment. The automatic funding half can be done by statute tomorrow, and there is a bill for it. The election trigger cannot. I have no clever escape, and I would rather name that plainly than let a reader discover it and conclude I was hiding it.

”You are describing both parties as equally at fault, and they are not.”

This one lands, and the reflexive answer would be dishonest. The framework in this pamphlet is symmetric: both sides refuse to close deals, both benefit from the fight. But the clearest example I offered is not. The 2024 border bill collapsed because one party’s leader publicly opposed it and the party followed, to the point that the bill’s own Republican author voted against advancing it. So: the incentives are symmetric; the specific instances are not always, and a document that cannot say so about a particular case will read as evasion to anyone who watched it happen. I hold to the structural claim. I withdraw any implication that every failure is evenly distributed.

”Shifting retirement toward investment accounts means paying for two systems at once.”

True, and this is the objection that has killed every previous version of this idea, including the last serious attempt in 2005. It is arithmetic, not ideology: money diverted into personal accounts is money that stops paying current retirees, who must still be paid, in full, for decades.

The answer begins by refusing the move that doomed every previous attempt. Do not divert the payroll taxes that are paying somebody’s grandmother this month. Seed the accounts with new money and let them grow into the job. Once you do that, the terrifying number resolves into three bills of very different character.

The first is the hole that already exists. The government has promised trillions more in future retirement benefits than it has scheduled revenue to pay. That gap is there whether or not anyone reads this pamphlet. Reform does not create it; reform drags it into daylight and closes it the ordinary way, by lifting the cap on the payroll tax.

The second is the transition itself: catch-up accounts for every worker under 45, funded by explicit appropriation at a published price, so the promise made to them is kept by two sources instead of one. It is a real bill, and I would rather state it than let someone else state it for me; the reckoning below carries the current illustration. What it is not is open-ended. It is paid over a defined period, and then it is finished.

The third is every generation after that, and it is astonishingly cheap: a seed at birth, about two-tenths of one percent of what the federal government spends in a year. Once the seeded cohorts pass through, each generation arrives at retirement holding assets it owns rather than a claim on the paychecks of the generation behind it. The pay-as-you-go arrangement does not get paid off. It stops existing.

”Higher returns in the stock market are not free money.”

Correct, and it is important. Stocks return more than bonds over long periods precisely because they sometimes collapse. Over forty years this usually works out. But nobody retires on the average; a person retires on a particular date, and people who reached that date in 2000 or 2008 took losses they never made back. This is why the accounts must grow automatically safer with age, and why the public floor beneath them is not decoration. It is the entire answer to this objection.

”If the government is directing trillions into the stock market, who decides what is in the index?”

A serious question with no fully satisfying answer yet. Pressure would come immediately to exclude firearms, or fossil fuels, or companies with disfavored labor practices or political donations, and the pressure would switch direction with each administration. Either that becomes an enormous new lever of political influence over private companies, or it requires governance rules durable enough that no administration can reach them. Nobody has yet demonstrated the latter. I would want it solved before the accounts grow large, not after.

”A budget rule will just produce accounting tricks.”

Every country that has adopted one has discovered this. Once a number is binding, the fight moves to what counts. Spending goes off-budget, gets relabeled as investment, becomes a tax expenditure, or turns into an unfunded mandate on states. Forecasts become optimistic in exact proportion to how much they need to be. This is why independent scoring is not a technical footnote in my proposal. Without it the rule is theater, and I would honestly rather have no rule than one that makes lying easier.

”There is no constituency for any of this.”

The most damning objection, because it is about power rather than merit, and merit has never been sufficient. Structural reform has no donor base, no organized bloc of voters, and no incumbent whose career it advances. Each repair here has a different coalition: the stock ban unites a populist Republican and a Georgia Democrat, ownership accounts unite venture capitalists and populists, fiscal rules unite deficit hawks, and those coalitions barely overlap and in several cases actively dislike each other. The bundle is what makes the argument coherent and what makes it hard to pass. I do not have a clean answer. My working thought is that the path runs through states and through individual reforms winning on their own merits, rather than through a national moment. But I hold that loosely, and if someone has a better theory I would rather hear it than defend mine.