My book Labor/Zero: A Post-Labor Economics Treatise just launched on Kickstarter, so I could really use your support! The link is here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero
Elon Musk keeps talking about “universal high income” but whenever he’s asked how to fund it, he waves his hands and mentions a VAT tax. I actually figured out how to build it. Here are eight concrete interventions that, when stacked together, can more than double the median American household income in today’s dollars.
Building Block 1: The Three Bucket Problem
Every dollar of household income comes from one of three sources. Wages come from selling your time. Capital comes from owning productive assets like stocks, bonds, and real estate. Transfers come from the government in the form of Social Security, tax credits, and public services. There is no fourth source. This is how the Bureau of Economic Analysis has tracked household income for decades, and it is an accounting identity that holds across every economy on earth.
Here’s why this matters. The median American household gets about 82% of its income from wages, 13% from transfers, and 5% from capital. Household spending drives over 70% of GDP. Income and payroll taxes account for 80 to 85% of federal revenue. The entire system, from consumer demand to government solvency, rides on wage labor.
And wage labor is structurally dying. Labor’s share of national income has dropped roughly 10 percentage points over five decades, falling from about 65% to 56%. Productivity has decoupled from wages since the 1970s, meaning the economy keeps growing but workers don’t see the gains. Transfer dependence has more than doubled, rising from 8% of personal income in 1970 to 18% by 2022, as successive governments quietly compensate for what the labor market no longer provides. Post-labor economics didn’t start with ChatGPT. It started half a century ago.
By process of elimination, capital and transfers must expand to replace declining wages. But we don’t want to build a society that is entirely dependent on government checks, so we need a capital-centric model rather than a labor-centric one. That is the entire thesis of Post-Labor Economics in a single sentence.
As wages collapse, they take the tax base and aggregate demand with them. By process of elimination, capital must become the new engine of household income.
Building Block 2: The Transfer Floor
Programs like Universal Basic Income, Negative Income Tax, Earned Income Tax Credits, and guaranteed income pilots all serve the same function. They put cash in people’s pockets when the labor market fails to. The US already transfers over $4 trillion a year to households through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, SNAP benefits, and tax credits. That is an enormous, mature system of income distribution that has been running for decades.
What most people miss is that transfers can come from every level of government simultaneously. Over 100 US cities have run guaranteed income pilots since 2020, typically providing $500 to $1,000 per month. Thirty-one states plus DC and Puerto Rico run their own earned income tax credits on top of the federal EITC. State-level supplements, municipal guaranteed income, and national programs like Social Security already layer on top of each other. The infrastructure exists. The question is just how much we scale it.
Transfers are essential. They deploy fast. They keep people from falling through the floor while longer-term solutions mature. But they are necessary and insufficient on their own. A population that depends entirely on government transfers is a population whose livelihood can be held hostage by whichever politicians happen to be in power. Benefits get means-tested, conditioned, cut, or revoked every budget cycle. Transfers should remain the floor, the universal baseline beneath which nobody falls.
Transfers are the floor beneath which nobody falls, and they should come from every level of government, but they should never become the entire building.
Building Block 3: Public Capital
This is where the building starts. A sovereign wealth fund is a government-owned investment portfolio that captures revenue, invests it, and distributes returns through dividends or public services. The principal stays intact and keeps growing. Instead of taxing and spending, you are investing and distributing.
At the national level, Norway’s Government Pension Fund holds roughly $2.2 trillion, earning returns that now exceed the oil revenue that created it. Singapore’s combined funds hold about $1.4 trillion for 5.9 million people, roughly $230,000 per citizen in public capital. Over 100 sovereign wealth funds exist worldwide, collectively managing more than $13.7 trillion. The US is the only major advanced economy without one, though the Trump administration signed an executive order in February 2025 directing its creation.
At the state level, Alaska’s Permanent Fund has paid per-capita dividends to every resident since 1982 and reduced poverty by 20 to 40% with no negative effect on employment. New Mexico’s state funds are projected to surpass oil and gas as the state’s leading revenue source by 2039. Texas has had a permanent school fund since 1854. Over 20 US state funds collectively hold more than $200 billion.
At the municipal level, cities like Copenhagen and Chattanooga have created urban wealth funds that capture value from public infrastructure. The Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank since 1919, returns $100 to $150 million annually to the state treasury. When you layer national, state, and municipal funds together, every citizen can eventually receive dividends from multiple levels simultaneously, just by being a citizen.
Dividend-paying endowments at every level of government turn citizens into shareholders of the economy itself.
Building Block 4: Baby Bonds and Universal Basic Capital
The biggest barrier to capital ownership is that it takes money to make money. Wealthy families set up trust funds and investment accounts at birth, letting compounding do the heavy lifting across generations. Everyone else starts from zero and can never catch up because they missed decades of compound growth.
Baby bonds solve this directly. The government deposits a sum into an investment account for every newborn. The money compounds for 18 years. When the young adult reaches maturity, they have a meaningful capital base generating returns for life. Connecticut launched the first state program in 2023, investing $3,200 for every baby born on Medicaid. The federal Trump Accounts, created in 2025, provide a $1,000 seed for every child born between 2025 and 2028, invested in an S&P 500 index fund. A universal $5,000 seed for all 3.6 million annual US births would cost roughly $18 billion per year, less than half a percent of the federal budget. At 7% real returns, $5,000 compounds to about $17,000 in 18 years.
For adults, automatic IRA enrollment programs are proving that making capital accumulation the default dramatically increases participation. Nineteen states have enacted these programs, and participation jumps from 5 to 15% up to 70 to 90% simply by switching from opt-in to opt-out. When saving becomes automatic, people save. When investing becomes the default, people invest.
Making capital ownership automatic and universal from birth is the single most efficient way to close the wealth gap at its root.
Building Block 5: Private Capital On-Ramps
Everything so far involves public capital managed by some level of government. The private side matters just as much because it gives households direct ownership that doesn’t depend on any politician’s agenda.
The most established vehicle is the Employee Stock Ownership Plan. There are currently 6,609 ESOPs in the US covering 15.1 million participants and holding over $2.1 trillion in assets. ESOP workers have roughly twice the retirement savings and 2.3 times the net worth of comparable non-ESOP workers. A massive window is opening right now as an estimated 2.3 million baby-boomer-owned businesses will need succession plans in the coming decade. Every one of those is a candidate for employee ownership conversion. If we miss this window, those companies get absorbed by private equity and ownership concentrates further.
Employee Ownership Trusts in the UK have grown 1,640% in the last decade. Worker cooperatives like Mondragón in Spain demonstrate viability at enormous scale with 80,000 worker-owners and $14.5 billion in revenue. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are creating entirely new forms of digital collective ownership. These all sit on top of the classical trio of stocks, bonds, and real estate. The goal is to create as many on-ramps as possible so that capital accumulation becomes easy, automatic, and the default for every household.
The more ways ordinary people can own a piece of the productive economy, the more resilient the whole system becomes.
Building Block 6: The Revenue Pivot
All of this requires funding, and the current revenue model is about to break. Income taxes and payroll taxes together account for 80 to 85% of federal revenue. Both are directly tied to the wage base. As wages shrink as a share of national income, this revenue evaporates. You end up with expenditure rising and revenue falling at the same time.
The solution is straightforward in concept. You tax other things. A value-added tax captures revenue from consumption regardless of how the buyer earned their money. The US is the only OECD nation without one. An automation or capital services tax replaces eroding payroll taxes by taxing the value created by machines. A carbon tax prices a shared resource and returns proceeds to citizens. A wealth tax on net worth above $50 million funds sovereign wealth fund capitalization. Data and AI royalties compensate citizens for the commercial use of collectively generated data. A land value tax captures appreciation that results from public investment rather than individual effort.
The critical sequencing principle is that new revenue sources must be enacted and generating receipts before the old revenue base collapses. You cannot legislate major tax reform during a fiscal crisis. Build the new pipes while the old ones still flow.
The entire government revenue model must pivot from taxing labor to taxing capital, consumption, and the commons before the wage-based revenue disappears.
Building Block 7: The Automation Cliff
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. We should have started building all of these institutions decades ago. Ideally the US would have begun capitalizing sovereign wealth funds in the 1970s when the productivity-wage gap first opened. Norway started in 1990. Alaska started in 1976. We’re decades behind.
Capital takes time to compound. A sovereign wealth fund capitalized at 3 to 5% of GDP per year, growing at 7% nominal returns, takes 25 to 30 years to reach maturity. Baby bonds need 18 years. These are irreducible time horizons. Compounding rewards early action exponentially and punishes delay exponentially.
Meanwhile, wages are going to fall off a cliff long before these capital programs mature. AI capability is advancing on exponential curves. The displacement of cognitive labor, the last safe harbor, is already underway. The gap between declining wages and immature capital programs is the most dangerous period in the entire transition.
That gap can only be filled with transfers. Universal basic income, expanded social insurance, and emergency direct payments will need to carry an enormous load during the bridge period, roughly 2030 to 2045. Peak transfer need could reach $36,000 to $48,000 per household per year. This is when the polity must sustain both capital accumulation and bridge transfers simultaneously, and political pressure to raid the wealth funds will be intense. Governance insulation is paramount.
We should have started building these institutions decades ago, which means we need a very thick transfer cushion while the capital programs mature.
Building Block 8: The Math
So when you stack all of these interventions together, what does the end result look like?
I ran convergence testing across three independent AI modeling approaches with five scenarios ranging from ultra-conservative to ultra-advanced. Across all fifteen data points, no scenario produced an outcome where the median household is worse off than today, provided the transition starts now.
The moderate scenario produces a median household income of roughly $140,000 in constant 2024 dollars, compared to about $83,730 today. That income flows from nine distinct streams. Residual wages make up about 14% of the total. Social insurance accounts for 24%. Universal basic income provides 28%. Sovereign wealth fund dividends contribute 10%. Private investment returns add 7%. Data and AI royalties supply 6%. Baby bond returns deliver 5%. ESOP and cooperative distributions generate 4%. Carbon and commons dividends round it out at 2%.
The composition shift is the key insight. Today the median household gets 82% of its income from a single source. In the mature end state, income flows from nearly a dozen sources, and none exceeds about a quarter of the total. That diversification is itself a resilience feature. And this is just the moderate scenario. In the long run, as capital programs fully mature and compound, capital-based income grows to dominate the household portfolio. The system transforms from “tax and redistribute” to “own and distribute.” Everyone’s income becomes structurally tied to the growth of the economy. That is universal high income.
When you stack all eight building blocks together, median household income exceeds $140,000 in today’s dollars, and the long-run ceiling is much higher as capital outgrows both wages and transfers.
Conclusion
You now have the full blueprint for Universal High Income. There is nothing here that requires exotic new inventions. Sovereign wealth funds exist in over 100 countries. Baby bonds are already operational. ESOPs hold $2.1 trillion. The tax instruments are deployed across the developed world. Every mechanism described here has a track record, real numbers, and proof of concept somewhere on earth. The challenge is scale, sequencing, and political will.
If you want the deep version, my book Labor/Zero covers all of this and more across 180,000 words with hundreds of citations. I narrated the audiobook personally. The Kickstarter is live right now, and every copy that reaches someone in a position to act moves the needle. Here’s the link: [link]
The core intuition is simple. Wages must be replaced by capital. The pivot will be long, hard, and painful. But the math works, the mechanisms exist, and the cost of delay is catastrophic.
Let’s get it done.
Link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daveshap/labor-zero
PS. I have a UHI Whitepaper!
You can check out the full UHI White paper here:
https://github.com/daveshap/UniversalHighIncome
It comes with a UHI simulator!
This is AMAZING work, David. Amazing 🤩. We need to get this in front of policymakers ASAP!
The numbers may work but the will to implement just ain’t gonna happen. Let’s get real here… you yanks voted Trump in for president. Enough said.