An argument for why the wealth we're producing should show up in your account. Laid out in full and tested against its strongest objections, including the parts that don't fully hold up yet.
Universal across class and ideology. You don't need a single economic model to recognize it.
"You contribute and someone else captures the return."
The American Dream: work hard, play by the rules, get a secure life, and your kids do better than you. That second half is the most visibly broken. The country is producing more wealth than ever, built partly with your tax dollars and run partly on your data, and none of it lands in your account. You already hold a stake in it. Effort has come loose from outcome, and so has ownership.
What's happening in Washington right now is a demolition with no blueprint. Anger at what broke isn't enough on its own. It needs an answer to "what instead?" Grievance with no construction project behind it is a business model for cable news, not a plan for the country.
"The rubble is sitting there. Someone gets to say what gets built on top of it. That someone is you."
Naming the difference before the mechanics: a reader who's seen the headlines will assume this is one of the plans already in play. It isn't either of them.
Trump's version: the federal government negotiates equity stakes company by company and holds them in the Treasury. By now it's a named program Wall Street calls "the American Sovereign Wealth Fund," with stakes in twenty-plus companies (Intel, chipmakers, critical-mineral and quantum firms) and labs like OpenAI floating a 5% handover of their own. No statute guarantees any of it reaches a citizen's account, and every piece can be renegotiated or undone the way it was made. Sanders' version, the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act: the government holds the equity with its own appointees on the board. That's more direct state control, and it still has no named personal account and no standing distribution rule. Both are live right now, real bills or executive actions, not hypotheticals.
Your Share separates from both on two axes at once:
| Control | Citizens own passively. Government doesn't sit on the board or vote the shares. Sanders' version does both, which reopens the "state control of the means of production" attack line. |
|---|---|
| Law vs. Deal | A standing law, enacted once, applies automatically to every company that crosses the threshold. This is what beats Trump's version, a negotiated executive deal with hand-picked companies: no statute, no named citizen account, revocable the moment the negotiating leverage changes. |
"Presidents cut deals. Owners have rights. And rights come with a check."
Quick test for telling this apart from either rival plan, or whatever comes after them: did a check arrive with no application, and is there a law guaranteeing one arrives again next year no matter who's president? Politicians make promises. Ownership survives them.
"You already own a share of what's been built. Companies have been pocketing the return on it without paying you. The check repays you."
This is a claim, not a complaint. "You deserve this," not "they took this from you." It has edge without needing a named enemy.
Not a safety net. Safety nets catch people who fall; floors are what you build up from. It changes the whole theory of government, from insurer of last resort to the foundation for a life.
The check isn't welfare. It's ownership paying out. And ownership looks like something: a stake with your name on it, in a fund you can watch grow. That's what makes it hold. People defend what they own. Nobody marches to protect a favor, but try taking away something with their name on it.
"When you collect that check it is your share as an owner of the resource. With the Alaska Permanent Fund, we converted a non renewable resource into a renewable. And you get a piece of that every year."
| On what basis | Already named back at the wound: that stake rides on paying the hidden rents, not soil. It's commons inheritance (Paine) plus public-investment equity (Mazzucato). "Companies have been pocketing the return on it without paying you. The check repays you." |
|---|---|
| Who owes | "If you profit from what we all own, or what we all built, you pay us." Tollbooth, not wanted poster. |
| What is owed | Equal per-person smoothed share: a fixed percent of a multi-year rolling average. Alaska calls this POMV, Percent of Market Value. |
Side effect worth noting: standing from paying-in (not soil) defuses the word-collision between "birthright" and the birthright-citizenship immigration fight.
Most people split freedom into two competing versions: freedom from something (interference, want, precarity) and freedom to do something (build, choose, take a risk). Most arguments make you pick a side. This one doesn't. There's no freedom to build a life without freedom from precarity first. Everyone gets to build a life they actually chose.
"You deserve better" and "the promise broke" are plain English. Anyone can say them, including the people who broke the promise. Those sentences will always be available to anyone. What you can do is make them incomplete without a mechanism behind them.
"If someone says you deserve better, ask: whose name is on the account, and what's the law that brings it back next year? If they can't answer both, they've borrowed the sentence, not the mechanism."
Every politician who uses this kind of language without naming an account and a law is, whether they mean to or not, pointing back at the real thing. Borrowed words wear out. A mechanism doesn't.
Here's the whole argument in one paragraph. Everything else on this page just backs it up.
We're producing more wealth than ever, and none of it is landing in your account. It was built partly on your tax dollars, and it runs partly on your personal data, and right now you don't own a share of either one. Here's the fix: one fund, called Your Share, with two streams. Stream one: when your tax money helps build or bail out a company, the public takes stock in it, not just the bill. Stream two: when a company runs on citizen data, it pays an annual royalty into that same fund. Once a year, the fund cuts you a dividend. Alaska has been doing exactly this with its oil wealth since 1982. The payment exists because the ownership exists.
"I believe in markets. Taking data and using it to manipulate people is not a real market. Let's admit that data is valuable, pay people for it, motivate them to make it better. Let's get out of the manipulation business."
This is not about UBI, or UBS, or any acronym. It's about whether the people who built this country's wealth get to see any of it land in their own account.
Your Share is one piece of something bigger. What replaces the deal that broke isn't a politician's promise. It's a new one that restores what people already earned rather than asking anything new of them.
We don't call it a "deal," on purpose. That's the word for a negotiated favor that can be renegotiated away, the word the people who broke the old promise keep reaching for. This is a restoration. The citizen side of the bargain never broke: you worked, played by the rules, paid in. Only the return side needs rebuilding, and that asks nothing new of you.
| Part | What it means |
|---|---|
| Share | Your annual dividend: the equity stream and the data royalty stream, combined |
| Floor | Universal basic services you can build a life on |
| Inheritance | A fund built to grow, so your kids start from higher ground than you did |
| Purpose | Not a fourth part so much as the point of the other three: "a life you actually get to build" |
"The check moves because it's a share, not a guarantee. And a country where everyone owns a share has more people pulling for it to do well."
Three jobs, three witnesses: durability, rigor, and long-run human outcomes. The third comes with real data-quality caveats, stated up front.
Live proof since 1982. 44 consecutive years of mail. 81% of Alaskans say the dividend improves their quality of life, which is real approval data, not just durability. It's a load-bearing precedent used three ways in the frame: mechanism proof, the inflation-attack parry ("Go ask an Alaskan"), and the eligibility rule (legal residency, one year, intent to remain, which includes the green-card taxpayer and excludes the bounty-ad attack).
"Alaska protected the fund in its constitution and left the check in statute. Guess which one politicians touched. So we write both into the wall. And here's what Alaska's worst year actually proved: even with the formula broken, no politician dared zero the check. Forty-four straight years of mail."
Concentration risk worth naming plainly: if Alaska's PFD is ever gutted or scandalized, three separate defenses lean on one pillar.
The inflation and employment claims don't rest on Alaska alone. Jones & Marinescu (AEJ: Economic Policy, 2022) is the peer-reviewed version of "go ask an Alaskan." By synthetic control, they find no effect on aggregate employment (a modest +1.8pp shift toward part-time) and evidence the dividend stimulated the local economy rather than destabilizing it. Still, Alaska remains the only long-running case of a government cutting a universal per-citizen check, so the mechanism-proof and eligibility jobs both run through one 44-year-old program. Norway's $2T+ fund (1990, 3% rule) proves a sovereign fund can hold enormous scale under a strict rule for decades, but it pays no individual dividend, so it can't stand in here.
"I haven't even thought about it. It meant that I could put more money in my grandchildren's college fund."
The largest UBI-style RCT ever run in the US: a $60M pre-registered field experiment, 3,000 low-income participants across Texas and Illinois, 2020–2023. Treatment got $1,000/month for three years; control got $50. Funded personally by Sam Altman, not OpenAI the company, a distinction worth keeping straight. This is the rigor witness: it answers "has this been tested at scale," not "does it transform lives."
Honest limit, stated up front: no measurable improvement in physical health or in children's academic and behavioral outcomes over three years. That's not a weakness to bury. It fits the argument's own position that the dividend's job is proof of ownership, not life transformation. A witness that oversold would be a liability. This one didn't.
Cash enables. It doesn't transform. That's the honest claim, and it's the one this argument actually makes.
Qualifier, stated first, not buried in a footnote: EBCI per capita is declining and harder to verify. The confirmed 2022 figure was $9,042 before tax; 2023 ran 8–14% lower on falling casino revenue; no public figure exists for 2024 on, after tribal leadership moved to members-only disclosure in late 2023. Don't cite a current dollar amount. What follows is causal, peer-reviewed, and untouched by any of that. Only the dollar figure is compromised.
An accidental natural experiment. Duke researchers were already tracking 1,420 Appalachian children for a mental-health study, about 350 of them Cherokee, when the tribe opened a casino and began paying roughly half the profits as equal per-person dividends, twice a year, by rule. No pilot design, no application, no selection effects.
Mechanism: the money worked largely through parents, with reduced household stress, better parental mental health, and more supervision. The check bought kids functioning families. Work did not collapse: the earnings reduction was ~$1,100 per recipient, a small fraction of the transfer.
"Same kids, same schools, same mountains. The check changed where their lives were headed."
Usage rule, unchanged: never lead with the casino; lead with the kids. Now paired with a second rule: never lead with a dollar figure either.
"The expectation is that social interventions have relatively small effects. This one had quite large effects."
Sources: the Alaska figures draw on the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation's dividend payment history (1982–present) and a 2023 survey of Alaskan voters by the Economic Security Project. The employment findings are Jones & Marinescu, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2022. The Cherokee findings are Akee, Copeland, Keeler, Angold & Costello, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2010, with intergenerational effects from Bruckner, Bustos, Dodge, Lansford, Odgers & Copeland, Nature Communications, 2024.
"A check with your name on it, and a life you actually get to build."
Any political program that lasts needs one day-one action that's genuinely hard to undo. This is that action for Your Share.
The account, explained plainly: "It works like your Social Security account: a record in your name, held by the government, that tracks what's yours."
Every adult citizen's account opens and pays out on day one, universally (see First Step, above). This isn't about who's eligible; it's about who to picture when you imagine this actually happening.
Not the only ones who get paid, but the recurring cohort whose first check lands the same year as their first vote. The check is the fact; the vote is the response. You're not voting to get something; you're voting because you already own it.
Their kids don't have a check coming yet; that starts at 18, same as everyone's (account-at-birth was considered and resolved against: nothing accrues before 18). Claim: "We made sure it was still standing when you turned 18." Not "we gave you this" but "we made sure it held." Any politician who tries to weaken the fund runs against every parent counting on it to be there.
The same test from the Claim section still holds here: politicians can promise a check. They can't promise you something you already own.
"If someone says you deserve better, ask: whose name is on the account, and what's the law that brings it back next year? If they can't answer both, they've borrowed the sentence, not the mechanism."
A case that's only ever heard its own best arguments hasn't earned belief. Here's what a serious skeptic says back, and what actually holds up.
Start with the obvious shot: Alaska's dividend runs about $1,000–$1,600 a year. That's real money for rent and groceries, but nowhere near "authorship of your life." Fair enough, and not this program's job to claim otherwise; that promise belongs to the Floor, not the Share. The dividend's job is narrower: proof that you own a piece of what you helped build. Then the sharper shot: isn't a state-run dividend just socialism with better branding? No. You hold a passive stake, like a 401(k), not a government running the company. The country already makes everyone share the risk whenever a bank or airline needs rescuing. This just means everyone shares the upside too.
Co-optation, inflation, and eligibility are already argued above: the no-check-no-share test in Live-fight, and Alaska's own forty-four-year record on both the money and who counts.
"If you give someone a dollar, [that dollar] has to come from somewhere."
The hardest question aims at Alaska itself: in 2016 the governor vetoed half the dividend, and courts ruled it was just a line item a legislature could touch whenever it wanted the money. A family that had budgeted a full check got about half, real money missing from real plans. That's not an embarrassment to bury; it's the blueprint. Alaska protected the fund's principal in its constitution but left the payout formula in ordinary statute. The vault was built right, the mail slot wasn't. Build both this time. And even in that worst year, no governor dared zero the check: forty-four straight years of mail, both parties. The claim was never that this replaces a paycheck on day one. It's that the public stops giving away its stock and data for free, and grows the check from there.
The sharpest objection is saved for last. The Act's own funding mechanism, seeding the first deposit from federal equity positions, traces straight back to TARP, the 2008 bailout plenty of Americans still remember as saving Wall Street while their family lost a home or a job. TARP eventually turned a profit by some accountings, and every dollar went to general Treasury receipts. Not one dollar reached an individual account, least of all the people whose tax money took the risk. That's not a reason to dodge the comparison. It's the reason to make it: TARP is this argument's own opening wound. This program keeps the identical mechanism and changes one thing, where the return lands: back with the people who backed the risk.
"TARP proved the government can turn a taxpayer rescue into a profit. It also proved that when it does, the profit disappears into the Treasury and nobody ever sees a dime of it. Same mechanism. Different mailbox."
Alaska does a lot of this arguing on our behalf. It's the one true story behind most of these answers, which is exactly why the record it keeps building matters as much as the argument itself.
Your Share is the first of four institutions this argument points toward, the one that's fully built and ready to fight for. The other three are at different stages, and we're saying so plainly rather than presenting them as more finished than they are.
Sovereign wealth fund seeded by public equity and data royalties, pays an annual dividend. Anchor: Alaska, nationalized. This is Your Share, everything above on this page.
Answers to: extractive industry's monopoly on public commons.
Deliberately narrow, not "healthcare and education": subsidized childcare hours, primary/preventive care access, and community college/trade-school tuition. Public infrastructure, not means-tested charity. "Roads don't check your income." Housing is out of scope for now.
Answers to: privatization of what should be infrastructure.
We launch with the piece that's provable, not the piece that's theoretically hardest. Your Share has forty-four years of Alaska behind it; that's why it goes first. The Capabilities project gets built out next, off the foundation Your Share establishes.
This case draws on a broad literature spanning universal basic income, universal basic services, and the "abundance" school of supply-side reform, including the research that cuts against parts of this argument. Here's what that reading turned up.
Two findings worth acting on. Gallup: net UBI favorability falls 50+ points across countries the moment tax-funding enters the question, real backing for "doesn't cost you a dime in new taxes." And a 2022 Political Behavior study: abstract "equalizing opportunity" and "limiting government" frames don't move conservative opposition, but framing centered on financial freedom and individual autonomy does, reducing both opposition and prejudice against recipients. That's the research behind the ownership/authorship framing running through this piece, not just instinct.
As of late June 2026: Amodei, Musk, and Altman have all endorsed some UBI variant, but every CEO version keeps the company in control of the mechanism and amount. The Sanders SWF bill inverts this: government takes equity, gets voting shares, pays dividends through a public fund. These are structurally incompatible visions, and it's an open question whether the CEO endorsements are genuine, preemptive PR, or an attempt to foreclose the public-ownership model before it arrives. Worth watching against Your Share, which stakes out that public-ownership alternative.
If one of these describes you, get in touch when the masthead is live at concordanddissent.substack.com.
Policy researchers, academics, think-tank wonks. Find what's missing before someone else does.
Campaigners, organizers, strategists. Come argue about whether ownership actually beats the alternatives on offer.
Civic entrepreneurs, donors, institution-builders. Help build this as an institution, not just an idea.