Description

Most Americans who struggle economically are not lacking in effort or ambition. They are lacking in time and money — and without adequate access to both, effort and ambition produce diminishing returns regardless of how much of each a person applies. This book starts from that observation and asks what specific reforms would change it.

The proposals are concrete, mechanistically described, and designed to align public benefit with private interest rather than depend on political goodwill or ideological consensus.

The Round-Up Service Charge directs the spare change from retail transactions to the employees of the businesses where purchases are made — raising wages at negligible consumer cost and without mandated minimums that distort hiring.

The Balance Stimulus provides a one-time capital infusion to lower-income working adults, funded by restructuring existing federal health spending, giving people the means to invest in their own opportunities rather than cycling through consumption-based assistance.

Employee-Termed Scheduling creates a tax credit for employers who offer workers meaningful control over their hours, addressing the time constraint directly rather than the income constraint alone.

The Centers for Economic Planning is the most structurally ambitious proposal: a publicly owned, democratically governed investment institution that accumulates capital on behalf of ordinary citizens and deploys it in the same markets and political environments where concentrated private capital currently operates unchallenged. It addresses not just economic inequality but the political inequality that makes economic reform persistently difficult to pass.

The book also addresses why proposals like these don’t get adopted — analyzing the industrial financing of political parties and the incentive structures that make the current system self-reinforcing — and makes a direct case to fiscally conservative audiences that spending money on direct opportunity is more efficient than spending it on goods and services delivered through politically connected contractors.