Honest books, and everyone owns something

WHAT IT CHANGES

6 changes. Anything underneath one of them is supporting detail, not another change.

1. 01

   The debt can't grow faster than the country does

   Judge the rule over a rolling period, not a single year, and have an independent body score it. Leave real room to borrow in a war, a crash, or a pandemic, but make that authority expire automatically after two years. Any extension requires a new recorded supermajority vote, and the excess debt returns to the normal rule on a published ten-year path, so an emergency ceiling cannot become the new floor.

2. 02

   Tax the same income at the same rate

   A dollar should not get a lower rate because it arrives as a capital gain or carried interest instead of a paycheck. Income should not escape tax forever because someone borrows against stock rather than selling it.

3. 03

   An investment account for every American, beginning at birth

   Put it by default in a low-cost, diversified fund whose risk adjusts automatically with age and funded status. It gets safer as retirement approaches or as the account becomes large enough to fund the floor, and published rebalancing rules keep it from dumping assets all at once after a crash. Fund the seed with new money — never by diverting payroll taxes paying current retirees. Roughly 3.6 million births a year at $10,000 each costs about $36 billion a year, and $10,000 left alone becomes something like $800,000 by age 65.

4. 04

   Put a limited insurance floor under the account

   If you follow the default strategy and low lifetime earnings or poor market returns still leave you below a defined minimum retirement income, the government fills only that gap. Set the full-career floor at 125% of the poverty line, about $1,660 a month in 2026. A comparable minimum benefit has been scored at 0.16% of taxable payroll, roughly $20 billion a year on the 2026 payroll base, though the exact account design still requires an actuarial score. You may invest more aggressively, but the guarantee covers only what the default strategy would have produced. At retirement, enough of the balance becomes a payment that lasts for life. Disability and survivor insurance remain because they cover different risks.

   GOVERNMENT INSURES THE SENSIBLE PATH, NOT EVERY BET

   Take more risk and win, and you keep the upside. Take more risk and lose, and the extra loss is yours. The guarantee is calculated against the published default strategy, not the portfolio you chose instead.

5. 05

   Phase it in by age without breaking promises

   Anyone who is 60 to 65 when the law takes effect keeps the full Social Security benefit currently scheduled. People 40 to 59 receive an age-phased legacy benefit — larger for those closer to retirement and smaller for those with more time to build an account — plus the new account itself. Their combined retirement income can never fall below the insured floor. People under 40 enter the account-and-insurance system. No payroll tax is diverted from benefits owed today. The old system's existing shortfall is separate: lift the payroll cap, trim benefits at the top, and do not raise the retirement age.

   NO SEPARATE TRILLION-DOLLAR CATCH-UP FUND

   The transition preserves all or part of a benefit already scheduled under Social Security, based on age at enactment. Those retained benefits remain in the old system's existing financing obligation; the exact age curve and cash-flow effects require actuarial scoring.

6. 06

   Address the student-debt problem once, then stop recreating it

   For existing federal loans, credit past payments, stop balances from growing when borrowers make reasonable income-based payments, and close out what remains after a fixed term of good-faith repayment. For future loans, fund only programs whose graduates can reasonably repay, and make colleges absorb a meaningful share of every loss when they cannot. Grants and access for low-income students remain.