The Open Field

A position paper for discussion

Reinvigorating America's Economy

A Position Paper for Discussion

This paper is meant to provoke thought and debate. The ideas below are offered as one coherent starting point, not a finished legislative program. Where a figure appears, it is illustrative, chosen to show the shape and trade-off of an idea rather than to fix a final number; the scenario matters more than the specific figure. The paper follows established precedent wherever it can, and says so plainly wherever it goes beyond current practice. Read it as an invitation to think about where the country could go, not as a bill to be enacted.

The Open Field

For a long stretch, the American economy turned effort into broadly shared gains, and doing your work well was enough to build a secure life. For many people that stopped being true, and the frustration that followed is real and earned. This paper starts from a simple premise: the principles that once made the economy work for most people are proven, and they can be applied, sometimes in new ways, to the world we live in now.

The organizing idea is the open field. An economy works when everyone can get onto the field and do what they do best, and when doing it well earns a genuinely better life. Government's job is to equip people to compete, through education, foundational research, honest rules, and open markets. It is not to favor who wins through subsidies, bailouts, or insider contracts, and it is not to gate who may play through needless barriers and licensing. Government builds and maintains the field. It does not play the game, and it does not decide the outcome.

The field carries an obligation in return. Success is never purely self-made. It draws on a system others built and maintain, the schools, the research, the rules, the public order that made the opportunity possible, so it carries a return obligation to keep that system open for the next person. Those who draw the most from that system have the most reason to keep it open. That is not charity, and it is not redistribution. It is the cost of keeping the field level.

The rest follows in order. A level field lets people do what they do best. Doing it well is rewarded. Broad prosperity is the result, not the premise. And a government living within its means keeps the whole thing standing. What follows is not a finished platform or anyone's party line. It is a set of proven principles, applied sometimes in new ways, offered for people across the spectrum to test, argue with, and build on.

Executive Summary

This paper asks how to re-create the open field for today's economy, one where people can do what they do best, contribution is rewarded, and the gains are broadly shared. That takes two things working together: a government that reliably does its part of the deal, and the fiscal discipline to keep doing it.

Government's part is to equip, not favor: to fund the foundations of opportunity while ending the subsidies, bailouts, and insider deals that tilt the field. Paying for that durably means living within realized income, matching what the government spends to what it actually takes in, so the commitments hold and the debt does not quietly foreclose the country's choices. Balance here is not austerity. It is what makes the investment in opportunity sustainable rather than borrowed against the future.

The pillars that follow move from the ideas likely to command the broadest agreement toward the hardest revenue and spending questions: ending corporate subsidies and restoring a level field, defending open trade, keeping Social Security solvent, opening healthcare to competition while capping premiums, simplifying retirement saving, reforming the treatment of capital in the tax code, and bringing defense onto a sustainable footing. Throughout, dollar thresholds are indexed to inflation, so that a rule keeps meaning the same thing over time and no one's taxes rise through inaction rather than decision.

I. Foundational Principles

Every proposal in this paper answers to the same short set of rules. They are the standard against which each provision can be judged, and the test any new idea should have to pass.

  • Equip, don't favor, and don't gate. Government builds and maintains the level field, through education, foundational research, honest rules, and open markets, but it does not pick winners through subsidies, bailouts, or insider contracts, and it does not wall people out through needless barriers.
  • The return obligation. Success draws on a system others built and maintain, so those who draw most from the field contribute most to keeping it open. Not charity, not redistribution, but the cost of a level field.
  • Reward building, not parking. Capital that funds and grows real enterprise is treated favorably; capital merely held, parked, or extracted is not.
  • Fiscal neutrality. Spending is matched to realized income, and structural deficits are designed out rather than tolerated.
  • One rule for everyone. Mechanisms are universal and sort by scale, so the same rule reaches the retiree and the billionaire, rather than carving out particular groups.

II. Policy Pillars

The paper develops seven interlocking pillars, ordered to begin with the least contentious ideas and build toward the hardest choices:

Pillar I: Ending Corporate Subsidies and Insider Deals

The first thing a level field requires is that government stop tilting it. Before asking anyone to contribute more or accept less, the paper asks the government to give up its own thumb on the scale: the subsidies, the carve-outs, and the insider deals that quietly decide winners before the competition begins.

1. The Role of Government: Equip, Don't Favor

Government has a real and active economic role, but it is a specific one. It equips people to compete by funding the things no single competitor will fund on its own, and it keeps the rules honest and the markets open. What it should not do is favor particular companies or industries, because every time it does, it substitutes political judgment for the market's, and the businesses best at winning subsidies crowd out the businesses best at serving customers.

2. Phasing Out Corporate Subsidies

Direct corporate subsidies would be wound down to zero. To avoid disruption, the phase-out is gradual rather than sudden: a subsidy would step down by a fixed share of its original value each year until it reaches zero over several years, giving firms time to adjust to standing on their own. The pace is illustrative; the direction is not.

3. Ending Preferential Tax Breaks

The same logic applies inside the tax code. Sector-specific credits, carve-outs, and deductions that favor particular industries would end, so that the code stops steering capital toward the politically favored and lets it flow to the genuinely productive.

4. Honest Contracting

Where government does buy from the private sector, it should buy the way a careful customer does. No-bid and cost-plus contracts would be barred as a default, because they reward relationships and inflate costs rather than rewarding the best value. Competitive, fixed-scope contracting becomes the rule, so public money buys results rather than access.

5. Funding Foundational Research

Government should fund the foundational research that no single firm will pay for because no single firm can capture its returns, the basic science and early invention that later becomes whole industries. This funding would be competitively awarded, modest as a share of the budget, and sunset by default, so it supports discovery without hardening into permanent programs for particular recipients.

6. Securing Critical Capacity

One narrow exception is warranted. Where a capability is genuinely essential to national security and cannot be reliably sourced, the country may support maintaining that capacity at home, understood as a form of supply-chain diversification rather than favoritism. The limits are strict: the support must serve a security purpose, back a capability rather than a chosen champion, be time-bound and transparent, and, because the exception is so easily abused, be hard to invoke, requiring an act of Congress rather than an agency's discretion.

Pillar II: Trade and the Open Field

Trade is the open field at a larger scale. The same logic that says government should not favor one company over another says it should not casually wall the domestic market off from the world, because open exchange, like open competition at home, is what lets people do what they do best and trade for the rest.

1. Trade Is Worth Defending

Open trade makes goods cheaper, widens what people can buy, and lets the country specialize in what it does well. Those gains are real and broadly shared, even when they are less visible than the losses. A serious trade policy starts by defending that value rather than treating trade as something to apologize for.

2. Tariffs Are an Emergency Tool, Not a Habit

A tariff is the international cousin of a subsidy: a government tilting the field, this time against foreign competition, with the cost landing quietly on domestic buyers. Tariffs imposed without clear justification would be rolled back. Going forward, tariffs would be treated as an emergency instrument: any new tariff would lapse automatically unless Congress affirmatively voted to keep it within a short window. This restores Congress's constitutional role over trade and keeps tariffs from hardening into permanent, invisible taxes on the public.

3. Security Through Diversity, Not Walls

Genuine supply-chain security comes from having many trusted suppliers, not from trying to make everything at home. The aim is a diverse base of reliable partners, supplemented by bounded domestic capacity only where security truly requires it. Reliable trading partners are a strategic asset, and the semiconductor supply chain, where concentration in a single vulnerable location is a real risk, shows why diversification rather than autarky is the sound answer.

4. Meeting the Human Cost

The gains from trade are broad, but the losses are concentrated on particular workers and towns, and that is real. The answer is to widen the ways back onto the field, not to freeze the field in place. That means help that follows the worker rather than propping up a failing firm: support for retraining, yes, but also for starting a business and claiming one's own corner of the economy, with the barriers to doing so kept low. Help the person move forward; do not subsidize the thing that is no longer working.

Pillar III: Keeping Social Security Solvent

Social Security is heading for a cliff, and it is close. Under current law, when the retirement trust fund runs short in the early 2030s, benefits are cut automatically and across the board by about 23 percent, leaving roughly three-quarters of scheduled benefits payable.1 This is not a distant problem or a scare. It is current law, and it reaches every beneficiary alike, the retiree just starting out and the one who has counted on the check for years. A worker who paid in for a full career would lose nearly a quarter of the benefit they earned, for no reason of their own.

This pillar takes that cut off the table and puts the program on footing that maintains itself. The promise is the same for everyone who paid in, at every income level: the benefit you earned will be there, in full.

1. The Guarantee

Start with the promise, because it is the payoff for everyone. Under this plan the scheduled benefit is real and secure. No automatic cut, no slow erosion. Whatever your income, the benefit you paid for is the benefit you receive. For anyone who has assumed for years that Social Security might not be there, that is the headline, and the rest of the pillar is simply how it gets paid for.

2. One Rate on All Income

Today the Social Security tax stops at a cap, currently around $180,000 of wages. Income above that line is outside the base entirely. Applying the same rate to all income, rather than stopping at the cap, is the largest single piece of the fix, and it changes nothing about the rate itself. Ordinary workers pay exactly what they pay now. The base simply extends the whole way up instead of ending partway.

This is worth being plain about. A higher earner contributes on all of their income and, like everyone else, receives the guarantee that their benefit is safe. Social Security has always been insurance rather than an investment: everyone pays in, everyone is protected, and the benefit was never meant to track contributions dollar for dollar. What the reform gives every participant, at every income level, is the same thing that matters most, certainty. The honest alternative to funding that certainty is not the status quo. It is the automatic cut, which reaches every beneficiary alike.

Removing the cap does not, by itself, close the whole gap. Recent estimates put it at a bit more than half of the long-term shortfall.2 The rest comes from the stabilizers below and from taxing benefits as ordinary income. Together they carry the program to solvency.

3. Benefits Taxed Like Any Other Income

Benefits would be treated as ordinary income under the same brackets as everything else. This is a deliberate alternative to means-testing, the approach usually proposed for high earners, which cuts or revokes benefits above an income line and so breaks the link between what you paid in and what you get back. Taxing benefits as income reaches the same goal by a cleaner route. A retiree with modest other income stays in a low bracket and keeps nearly all of the benefit. A retiree with substantial income pays the ordinary rate on it, so a fair share returns. Everyone still receives the benefit they earned. The tax code simply does the sorting it already does, with one rule applied the same way to all.

4. Solvency That Maintains Itself

Two stabilizers keep the program balanced without another rescue a generation from now. The first measures cost-of-living raises with a more accurate inflation gauge, chained CPI. The second ties raises to the program's health: when it is paying out more than it takes in, increases pause until it is back in balance. This is fiscal neutrality applied to Social Security. Rather than promise raises it cannot fund and borrow to cover them, the system lives within its means and corrects itself quietly, instead of through a crisis and a scramble in Congress.

5. Crediting Care

The system treats years spent raising children or caring for aging parents as zeros, dragging down the benefit as if that work were no work at all. It is work, and often the reason someone stepped away from a paycheck. This plan credits those years instead of penalizing them, so no one reaches retirement with a smaller benefit for having cared for family. This is not a new handout. It is the system finally counting work it always should have.

Pillar IV: Healthcare Competition and a Cap on Premiums

Ask why someone stays in a job they have outgrown, or does not start the business they can already picture, and often the answer is not ambition or nerve. It is health insurance. When coverage is chained to a paycheck, leaving means gambling your family's health on it, and most people will not take that bet. So they stay put. The idea sits unbuilt, the move unmade. An open field is supposed to let people take their best shot, and health coverage tied to an employer is one of the largest quiet barriers stopping them.

This pillar cuts that cord. Your coverage should be yours, chosen by you and carried with you, so that changing jobs, going independent, or betting on an idea never costs you your health security. Coverage that follows the person is not only fairer; it releases a great deal of risk-taking the country currently leaves on the table, held back by a fear that has nothing to do with the merits of the venture. The goal throughout is an American health system that is stronger for being sustainable, not smaller in ambition.

And coverage is becoming unaffordable in ways that make the case on their own. In 2026, benchmark premiums on the individual marketplace rose more than 20 percent in a single year, the steepest jump in nearly a decade, and for many households the amount actually paid is set to more than double as temporary subsidies lapse.3 Employer family coverage now averages about $27,000 a year, roughly the price of a new car; the worker sees around $6,850 of that come out of their paycheck, and the rest comes out of wages they never see, spent on their behalf and invisible to them.4 Both figures are rising more than twice as fast as inflation. These are not the numbers of a working market. They are what happens in a system that hides its prices, ties coverage to where you work, and shields insurers from real competition.

The fix keeps the private market and makes it work. It builds one marketplace everyone uses for their whole life, keeps Medicare and makes it simpler, lets employer money follow the worker instead of trapping them, disciplines prices with honest competition, and puts a firm ceiling on what any household can be asked to pay. Because everyone shares one large pool, coverage gets cheaper for the same reason bulk anything gets cheaper: scale.

1. One Marketplace, for Life

Coverage today is a patchwork sorted by circumstance: an employer plan for most workers, the marketplace for some, Medicaid below a certain income, Medicare at 65. Every seam between them is a place people fall through, lose their doctors, or get moved against their will. This pillar replaces the seams with a single marketplace open to everyone, at any age and any income, choosing among competing plans under one set of rules.

The effect is that coverage follows the person. It does not end when you leave a job, and it does not switch to a different system when you turn 65. You choose a plan on the same exchange at 30, at 55, and at 80. Turning 65 changes nothing, which is the point: the disruptive enrollment scramble that happens at that age today simply goes away. And because everyone is in one pool rather than thousands of separate ones, the pool is large, mixed, and cheaper to cover than the fragmented markets it replaces.

2. Medicare for Everyone, Simpler and on the Exchange

Medicare is not going anywhere, and now it is open to everyone. This is the change to say plainly: Medicare is no longer something you wait until 65 to receive. It is available at any age, a plan anyone can choose, whether you are 26 or 66, and turning 65 no longer switches you into it, because you could have had it all along. Just as important, no one is pushed into it. Medicare is one option among many, there for you if you want it and easy to pass up if something else fits your life better.

It also gets simpler. Today a beneficiary assembles coverage from separate parts, hospital, physician, and drug, then buys a supplemental policy to fill the gaps, a system confusing enough that people hire advisors to work through it. Those pieces would merge into a single integrated Medicare plan. One plan, one card, nothing to assemble. So the promise is plain: it is still Medicare, it is now one simple plan instead of four pieces, it is open to you at any age, and it is a choice, never an assignment.

That integrated Medicare plan is the public option, and it does double duty. It is coverage for anyone who chooses it, and it is the benchmark that keeps everyone else's prices honest. Alongside it sit private plans, the same model as today's Medicare Advantage, for the many people who will prefer a private plan, and picking one is entirely up to you. Because Medicare plays by the same benefit, quality, and regulatory rules as every private plan while carrying a standardized, reasonable margin, illustratively 5 percent, it cannot undercut competitors with artificially low, taxpayer-subsidized prices, and private carriers get a stable, transparent number they must beat on cost and efficiency. The aim is not to drive private insurance out. It is to give you a solid public choice and a field of private ones, and let you decide.

3. Coverage That Follows the Worker, Not the Job

The tax code today exempts employer-provided health benefits from taxation, and rewards keeping coverage inside an employer's own plan. That single quirk does enormous quiet damage. It hides the real cost of care, locks workers into jobs they would otherwise leave, and keeps healthy workforces siloed in separate pools instead of joining the common one where scale would make coverage cheaper for all.

So the preference for employer-held plans ends, and everyone comes into the same marketplace. Employers stay in the picture, but their money follows the worker rather than binding them. An employer contribution flows toward the same coverage subsidy every person is entitled to, the amount that holds their premium within the income cap, and counts toward it rather than stacking on top. Where an employer contributes more than that amount, the worker simply uses the employer's contribution. Where it contributes less, the public subsidy makes up the difference. Where an employer contributes nothing, the person receives the full subsidy, exactly as anyone without an employer would. The money follows the person to the plan they chose, and no one is subsidized twice.

This asks something of employers in return, but only fairness. An employer that contributes nothing leaves the public to cover its workers, and in that case it reimburses what the public spent on its behalf. This is not a penalty for failing to offer a plan, and not a mandate to run one. It is a simple rule against offloading your costs onto everyone else: if taxpayers cover your workforce because you chose not to, you pay taxpayers back. A small employer with few subsidized workers owes little; a large one that contributes nothing pays the full cost it shifted. The charge is triggered only when the public actually steps in, so an employer whose people are covered owes nothing.

4. Medicaid Stays, but No Longer Locks Anyone In

Medicaid remains, and keeps doing what it does, including the things the marketplace does not, such as long-term care. What changes is that it stops being a locked door. Today, below a certain income, Medicaid is not one option among several; it is the only one, and those who qualify are shut out of the marketplace entirely, denied the choice everyone above that income line takes for granted. That is backwards. The people with the least are given the least say.

So anyone who qualifies for Medicaid may keep it, or may instead choose a plan on the marketplace, with the subsidy reaching all the way down the income scale so that a marketplace plan costs a low-income household little or nothing, just as Medicaid would. This is not a cut to Medicaid. It is the end of the rule that made Medicaid someone's only option. The lowest-income family gets the same marketplace, the same plans, and the same choice as everyone else, in the same system rather than one set apart.

5. A Ceiling on What Anyone Pays

No household should be priced out of coverage. The share of income any household can be asked to pay for a benchmark plan is capped, illustratively at 8.5 percent, with refundable credits covering the rest, and indexed so it holds its meaning over time. The ceiling is uniform, the same whether you earn a little or a lot, which removes the subsidy cliff where earning one more dollar can cost a family thousands in lost help. It makes coverage predictable, protects people from the kind of overnight surges now hitting the market, and keeps insurers competing to deliver under the ceiling rather than above it.

6. Where This Goes Beyond Current Law

Most of this pillar builds on structures that already exist: the marketplace and its income-based subsidies, Medicare, Medicare Advantage as the private-plan model, the employer shared-responsibility idea, and the employer role in funding coverage. Several pieces go further, and they deserve scrutiny as such. A public plan carrying a deliberate, fixed margin to serve as a price benchmark is new, and whether it disciplines the market as intended is a fair thing to test. Merging Medicare's parts into a single exchange plan is a real simplification with real administrative work behind it. Extending subsidies below the current Medicaid threshold reshapes the boundary between the two programs and touches the shared federal-state financing that funds Medicaid today. And moving everyone into one marketplace is a large transition that would reshape the employer-based system most Americans now rely on; the case for it is that one large pool covers people more cheaply and more freely than thousands of separate ones, but a change of that size belongs in the open, named for what it is.

Pillar V: Simpler Retirement Saving

The country's retirement system is a maze. A worker navigates an alphabet of accounts, each with its own limits, rules, and tax treatment, and the result is that saving for retirement is harder than it should be for exactly the people who most need to do it. This pillar replaces the maze with one account and one rule.

1. One Account, One Rule

A single retirement account replaces the entire patchwork of plan types. It is a Roth account: contributions are made from money already taxed, and everything after that, the growth and the withdrawals, is tax-free. The same account and the same rules apply to everyone, whether or not their employer offers a plan, which ends the quiet unfairness in which your retirement options depend on who you happen to work for.

2. One Cap That Carries Forward

There is one annual contribution limit on what lands in the account, illustratively around $36,000 of post-tax money, from any source, and it is indexed to inflation. What makes it humane is that unused room carries forward. If you cannot save much in a lean year, that capacity is not lost; it waits for you, and you can use it later when you are able. This single feature does the work of several older mechanisms at once. It means no one is penalized for saving late, the young worker who could not contribute in their twenties is not forever behind, and anyone who fell behind has room waiting to catch up. Your lifetime capacity to save is never forfeited to the timing of your circumstances.

3. Employer Contributions

Employers can still contribute, and their contribution is treated as what it is: compensation. It is taxed as income when made, with the tax withheld at the source the way a bonus is, and the net amount that lands in the account counts against the annual cap like any other dollar. This keeps the account uniform, every dollar in it is post-tax and grows tax-free, with no separate pre-tax pocket to track, and it means the value of an employer's contribution is real and immediate to the worker rather than buried in a different tax treatment.

4. Moving to the New System

Existing pre-tax balances do not have to move, but savers are given a favorable, time-limited way to bring them into the new Roth world if they choose. For a limited window, a saver may convert a traditional balance to Roth, and the conversion is reckoned through the same graduated inclusion scale that applies to capital gains, described in the tax pillar. Because the scale is annual and rises with the size of what runs through it in a year, a saver can convert a sensible amount each year, spread across the window and smoothed by income averaging, much as careful savers already convert up to the top of a tax bracket today. Conversions and capital gains draw on the same annual budget on that scale, so no one can shelter a large conversion in an otherwise empty year. The window is a one-time bridge, meant to help people move and to bring some deferred tax forward as the system transitions, not a permanent feature. After it closes, conversions are treated as ordinary income. Traditional balances that are never converted remain taxed as ordinary income on withdrawal, as they are today.

5. Accounts After Death

A Roth account's tax-free status is a benefit for the saver, not an inheritance shelter. When the account passes to an heir, its tax-free character ends. The heir receives it as ordinary capital, valued at the date of death, and any growth from that point is a normal capital gain under the rules in the tax pillar. Nothing is owed on the value inherited; the account simply rejoins the ordinary treatment of capital going forward.

Pillar VI: Tax Reform and the Treatment of Capital

An open field needs two things from the tax code: rules that treat similar income similarly, and enough revenue to keep the field itself in good repair. This pillar aims at both. It does not reinvent the code. It narrows the gap between how a dollar of wages and a dollar of gain are taxed, reckons accumulated wealth at the moments it changes hands, and keeps the rules simple enough to follow. Most of what follows adapts machinery that already exists here or in peer countries; the few genuinely new pieces are named as such in the closing section.

One idea runs through all of it: capital that is actively building something is protected, and capital that is merely held or extracted is eventually settled up. The figures below are illustrative, and every dollar threshold in this pillar is indexed to inflation, so that a rule keeps its meaning over time and no one's taxes rise through inaction rather than decision.

1. Ordinary Income and a New Top Bracket

The existing brackets stay. The one change is a new top rung: a 50 percent marginal rate on ordinary income above $1,000,000. The schedule climbs as it does today and simply tops out higher, asking the most of the highest incomes while leaving the rest untouched.

2. Relief for the State-Tax Stack

A higher top rate sits on top of state income tax, and in a high-tax state the two together can reach punishing levels. So the state-and-local deduction returns, capped at a flat amount, illustratively $50,000, that is the same for every filer, with no phase-out. The cap is what makes it relief rather than a loophole: it eases the genuine double-tax stack that high-tax-state households feel, while a state that taxes beyond the cap is spending its own residents' money, not the nation's.

3. Capital Gains on the Same Footing

The code taxes labor more heavily than capital. This narrows that gap. The separate capital-gains schedule is retired, and gains instead enter ordinary income on a graduated scale set by the size of the gain, not the taxpayer's income:

  • Under $100,000: none of the gain is included.
  • $100,000 to $500,000: one-quarter is included.
  • $500,000 to $1,000,000: one-half is included.
  • $1,000,000 to $10,000,000: three-quarters is included.
  • Above $10,000,000: the full gain is included, taxed exactly as wages are.

Keying the scale to the gain keeps the investment incentive universal: everyone gets gentle treatment on their first increments, and only the largest realizations are drawn fully onto labor's footing. A single lumpy year is handled by opening an existing relief, the three-year income averaging that farmers and fishermen already use under Schedule J, to every taxpayer, so a one-time sale can be spread while steady realizers gain nothing from it.

4. Rewarding Capital That Builds

A dynamic economy rewards putting capital to work building the new, and it offers that reward to anyone. The preference attaches to the activity, not the actor: a teacher backing a local startup and a venture fund are treated alike. What draws the line is the direction the capital flows. Capital that funds and grows real enterprise the investor helps run earns favorable, deferred treatment; capital that is parked, held for passive return, or pulled back out does not. Proceeds redeployed into new enterprise stay deferred, with the tax coming due when the capital stops working. Buying a business to run it qualifies; buying it to strip it, borrowing against it to pay out its owners, triggers recapture of the deferred tax. And however long tax is deferred by keeping capital in motion, death and departure reckon it in the end. Deferral is never escape.

5. The Primary Residence

A person's home is not an investment held for passive return; it is where they live, and the tax code should treat it that way. The gain on a primary residence is excluded up to a generous threshold, illustratively $10,000,000 of gain, which covers essentially every home in the country, whether the home is sold during life or passes at death. The exclusion applies to one primary residence, the place you actually live; second homes and investment property are treated as the investments they are. This is what lets the realization rules that follow apply cleanly to accumulated wealth without ever reaching the family home.

6. Realization at Death

For most families this changes nothing they will feel. The home is already protected by the residence exclusion above, and a retirement account, already post-tax, carries no further tax; a family that passes those two things owes nothing. A family business is protected too: where heirs actively run it, the tax is deferred, and that deferral carries forward for as long as the business keeps operating, coming due only if it is sold or shut down. This adapts the rule that already protects family farms and closely held businesses, which defers tax while heirs keep operating and recaptures it if they sell within ten years.5

With those protections in view, the change itself: the federal estate tax is abolished, and death instead becomes a realization event, with accrued gains running through the same inclusion scale as any other gain. The heir inherits at the date-of-death value, so no gain is taxed twice. What this actually reaches is investment wealth held beyond the home and the retirement account, the large portfolios and holdings that current law ushers across generations untaxed through the step-up in basis, under which a lifetime of gains is simply erased at death.6 Treating death as a realization event is well established abroad; Canada has done it since 1971, as have Denmark and Hungary.

7. Gifts

If only death triggered a reckoning, lifetime giving would be the way around it. So a gift of value is income to the person who receives it, taxed at their ordinary rate in the year received, and the old gift-and-estate-tax machinery retires with it. This is a deliberate simplification: value in is income, whether it was called a gift or a payment. It also means a gift to someone in a lower bracket is taxed there, a modest and accepted benefit to ordinary families. Transfers between spouses are not triggering events, gifts to charity are exempt, and ordinary small gifts fall away on their own, retiring the separate gift exclusion. Taxing transfers by realization is itself common abroad; Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom all tax gains transferred by gift.

8. Looking Through Passive Shells

Wealth can also be parked inside a corporate shell to sit outside the individual brackets. To keep that door shut, a closely held entity that exists to hold passive wealth rather than run a business is looked through to its owners; one that genuinely operates a business is not. The line is the same active-versus-passive test the rest of the pillar uses, and the precise mechanics are left to implementation rather than fixed here with numbers that would only invite gaming.

9. Leaving the System, and Coming Back

The United States is one of only two countries that tax citizens on worldwide income wherever they live.7 For some nine million Americans abroad, that means a lifetime of U.S. filings and foreign-asset reports even when nothing is owed. This pillar moves the country onto the same footing as the rest of the world: tax follows residence, not citizenship, ending a compliance ordeal in line with bipartisan legislation already before Congress.

The safeguard is an exit tax, the same realization logic applied at the edge of the system. Changing tax residency is a realization event: worldwide assets are treated as sold at fair market value, gains run through the inclusion scale, and settlement happens on the final resident return. Below a threshold, illustratively $10,000,000 of gains, the liability can be deferred until assets are actually sold, up to ten years. The United States already taxes expatriation this way for large holders, and Germany, Canada, Australia, and France all impose similar exit taxes. Return is allowed without penalty but is not a revolving door: someone who genuinely re-establishes residency, judged by the residency and closer-connection tests already in the code over a multi-year window, can have the liability reset as though they never left, while a nominal return followed by another departure reinstates it. This spares the genuinely mobile, the employee rotated abroad and back, while closing the cycle that would let the reset launder years of deferral.

10. Where This Goes Beyond Current Law

Most of this pillar adapts what already exists, here or in peer democracies: income averaging, the small-business rollover, the family-business continuity rule, and exit taxation are all current tools, and realization at death and by gift is established across Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Three things genuinely extend past current practice, and they deserve scrutiny as such. Grading capital-gains inclusion by the size of the gain adapts Canada's flat-inclusion idea into a rising scale of our own design. Qualifying investment by the direction of capital flow, with recapture on extraction, is a new application of a familiar tool. And taxing gifts as ordinary income to the recipient is a simplification chosen over the machinery it replaces. These are placed in the open on purpose.

Pillar VII: A Sustainable Defense

Every other pillar in this paper asks the same question: what is this actually for, and are we still paying for a premise nobody chose? Defense is where that question is hardest and most overdue. For most of a lifetime the United States has funded a military sized not to a mission we deliberately picked, but to an inherited assumption, that America is the permanent, universal guarantor of order everywhere at once. That assumption was never really voted on. It simply accumulated, and the spending accumulated with it. This pillar proposes to make the premise explicit and choose it on purpose, and to build a defense that is stronger for being sustainable.

1. Buying to a Purpose We Choose

A defense budget should follow from a clear answer to a simple question: what is the military for? Answer it deliberately, defend the homeland, honor our treaty commitments, and be the decisive partner where it truly counts, and the force you need follows from that answer. Answer it by inertia, be everywhere and deter everyone and police every region, and you buy a vast, expensive posture no one ever consciously decided to maintain. The reset is not primarily about spending less. It is about buying to a purpose we actually chose, which happens to weight toward the capabilities that matter now, the technological edge, a resilient industrial base, a credible deterrent, and away from legacy structure built for a role we are setting down.

2. A Strong Partner, Not the Sole Guarantor

For decades, allies could underinvest in their own defense because America would cover the difference. That era is ending, and its ending is healthy. The goal is not to abandon our allies but to change our role among them: from the substitute that lets others under-provide, to the strong partner in a system where each carries its own weight. This is not hypothetical. In 2025, European allies and Canada raised their defense spending by roughly 20 percent in a single year, and for the first time in the alliance's history a European member spent more per person on defense than the United States.8 The partners are stepping up. The task is to steer that shift deliberately rather than resist it or let it happen by accident.

3. Right-Sizing on Our Own Terms

There are two ways a nation brings its defense spending back in line with its means: on its own schedule, by choice, or later and all at once, forced by circumstance. The first is deliberate and stabilizing. The second is a crisis. This pillar chooses the first. A country that scales its commitments to what it can sustain, before it is compelled to, keeps command of its own choices. One that waits until the bill forces the question does not.

4. A Declared Handoff, on a Real Clock

The transition has to thread a needle. Move too abruptly and you tear a hole in security before allies can fill it, and you shock economies, ours and theirs, that are built around current spending. Move without any firm commitment and allies have every reason to stall, keeping the American subsidy in place by simply not hurrying. Neither serves anyone.

So the handoff is declared and scheduled, but paced. The direction and the destination are fixed and announced: the United States is moving to a partner posture, and it is not waiting indefinitely to do so. But the pace is managed to avoid a cliff, phased so that industries can retool, forces can restructure, and allied build-ups can come online without a shock to any economy. Crucially, the clock runs regardless. Allies have already committed, through NATO, to a path toward substantially higher defense investment over the coming decade, with their own interim milestones. This plan paces the American drawdown to that agreed trajectory and holds to it, so that an ally who lags is not creating a reason for America to stay, but an exposure it must close itself. Throughout, the United States retains its sovereign floor, the defense of the homeland, the nuclear deterrent, and its treaty obligations, which are not on the table. The point is a handoff allies can plan around but cannot wait out.

5. Defense Within Our Means

Defense answers to the same discipline as everything else in this paper. A military the country cannot afford is not a strength; it is a vulnerability wearing the costume of one. The savings from right-sizing are not a fund to be spent elsewhere. They are part of how the whole plan lives within its means, one of the largest single places where spending can be brought back in line with revenue.

There is a particular folly in borrowing to build. When a nation funds its military with debt, and some of that debt is held by the very powers it is arming against, it hands those rivals a lever. A creditor has leverage over a debtor, the more so when the debtor depends on the creditor's continued willingness to lend. A country in that position has not bought strength; it has bought a dependency its competitor can exploit, a string that can be pulled at the moment of maximum consequence. Real strength is security that rests on your own sound finances, not on a rival's patience. A military financed by those you may one day have to face is a weakness dressed as power.

6. Where This Goes Beyond Current Assumptions

The hardest honesty this pillar owes is about the bet it makes. Right-sizing on a declared clock assumes that firm, scheduled American drawdown will spur allies to accelerate rather than freeze, and that a phased handoff can be managed without opening a window an adversary exploits. The evidence of the last few years, allies moving faster once the United States signaled it was serious, suggests the pressure works. But it is a judgment, not a certainty, and the direction of global military spending is currently upward, not down, which means a deliberate American drawdown runs against the prevailing tide and must be argued on its merits, not assumed. This is the provision most in need of open debate, and it is placed here for exactly that reason.

Conclusion

The through-line of this paper is a single idea worn many ways: keep the field open, keep it honest, and keep the government that maintains it solvent. Every pillar is that idea applied to a place where the field has tilted. Government has been favoring winners, so stop the subsidies and the insider deals. Trade has become a tool for tilting the field rather than widening it, so make tariffs the rare exception they should be. Social Security has drifted toward a cliff, so fund the promise honestly and let one rule apply to every dollar. Health coverage has been chained to a job, so cut the cord and let it follow the person. Retirement saving has become a maze, so make it one account and one rule. The tax code has treated a dollar of parked capital more gently than a dollar of work, so bring them onto the same footing and reckon accumulated wealth when it changes hands. And defense has been sized to an inherited mission no one chose, so choose one, and build to what the country can sustain.

None of this is a party's program, and it is not offered as one. Some of it will read as coming from the right, some from the left, and that is rather the point: the open field is not a position on the familiar spectrum but a different axis altogether, one that asks of any policy not whether it grows or shrinks government, but whether it keeps the field level and the country solvent. A good many fights that look intractable when posed as government against market look different when posed as: does this help people get onto the field and do their best work, and can we afford to keep it that way?

The specifics here are meant to be argued with. The figures are illustrative, the mechanisms are open to better ones, and several provisions are flagged honestly as going beyond current practice precisely so they can be tested. What is not offered up for trade is the frame itself: that opportunity and solvency are not opposing goals but the same goal seen from two sides, and that a country can be both fair and disciplined if it is willing to hold both at once. That is the invitation. The rest is a conversation worth having.

Appendix: Direction and Magnitude

A paper whose central discipline is fiscal neutrality owes the reader a sense of whether its parts add up. It cannot offer a precise score. Precise scoring is the work of the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, it depends on modeling behavior the paper deliberately leaves open, and several provisions here are set as scenarios rather than fixed numbers. What the paper can do, and what comparable cross-spectrum proposals do, is state the goal as a ratio rather than a dollar sum, show the direction and rough magnitude of each pillar, and lean on figures the official scorekeepers have already published for options that resemble these. That is the purpose of this appendix. Every figure below is drawn from CBO or JCT estimates for a comparable option; none is the paper's own calculation, and all are directional.

The Target

The right target is not a balanced budget by a date certain. It is a stable and declining debt-to-GDP ratio, the standard measure of whether a country is living within its means over time. The federal deficit is currently around $1.9 trillion a year, close to 6 percent of GDP, and on the current path debt rises to roughly 118 percent of GDP within a decade.9 The aim of this paper is to bend that path down, deliberately and on the country's own terms, rather than wait for a forced correction. Stabilizing the ratio does not require closing the entire deficit at once; it requires a credible, sustained trajectory of the kind the pillars below are meant to produce.

The Pillars, by Direction and Rough Magnitude

The estimates that follow are ten-year figures, cited from CBO or JCT analyses of options that resemble the paper's provisions. The paper's actual versions differ in design, so these establish order of magnitude, not a score.

Large revenue, tax pillar. The tax pillar is the paper's largest revenue source, and its central moves have all been scored in comparable form. Making death a realization event and taxing gains at death is the kind of structural change CBO lists among its deficit options; a related administration proposal to tax capital gains as ordinary income and treat death as a realization event was significant enough that CBO treated it as a major revenue item.10 A new top ordinary rate is in the same family as CBO's option to raise the top rate, scored in the range of $200 billion on its own.11 Graduated inclusion of capital gains is a larger version of CBO's "raise capital-gains rates" option and its "change the taxation of assets transferred at death" option.12 Taken together, and depending entirely on rates and behavior, the tax pillar is plausibly a multi-trillion-dollar revenue source over a decade, the single largest lever in the paper, though also the most sensitive to behavioral response, since people realize gains less readily when realization is taxed more heavily.

Large spending reduction, defense. Defense is the largest single place to reduce spending. CBO estimates that reducing the Department of Defense's annual budget along the lines of relying more on allies could save on the order of $900 billion or more over ten years.13 The paper's version is deliberately posture-first and paced to the allied handoff, so its magnitude depends on the speed of that transition, but the direction is a large, sustained reduction, and it is the paper's largest spending-side contribution.

Self-contained, Social Security. The Social Security pillar is important to state precisely because it is easy to miscount. It fixes Social Security's own shortfall and does not contribute to the general-fund deficit. Removing the payroll cap raises very large sums, CBO and the Trustees score cap-related changes in the trillions over a decade, but that revenue is dedicated to Social Security and closes the program's roughly $2.6 trillion ten-year gap rather than the general deficit.14 The honest accounting is that this pillar makes Social Security solvent on its own terms and should not be credited against the broader deficit.

Modest but structural, ending subsidies and honest contracting. Ending corporate subsidies and reforming contracting is small in ten-year budget terms relative to the tax and defense levers, but it is structurally central: it is what earns the standing to ask everyone else to contribute, and it removes distortions whose cost to the economy exceeds their line-item size.

Uncertain, possibly a net cost, healthcare. Honesty requires flagging that the healthcare pillar could widen the deficit rather than narrow it, at least in direct budget terms. Extending subsidies to everyone and reaching near-zero cost for the lowest incomes increases federal outlays. Against that, ending the tax exclusion for employer coverage is a large revenue raiser, CBO scores reducing that subsidy at roughly $900 billion over ten years, and the freeloader cost-recovery and the scale efficiencies of one large pool offset some of the new spending.15 The net could fall on either side, and the pillar's primary justification is not deficit reduction but coverage, portability, and lower total system cost. It should not be counted on as a deficit-closer.

What This Adds Up To

The direction is clear even where the precise sum is not. The two largest levers, the tax pillar on the revenue side and defense on the spending side, are each plausibly worth on the order of a trillion dollars or more over a decade in comparable CBO terms, which is meaningful against a deficit near $1.9 trillion a year. Social Security fixes itself and should be kept in its own column. Ending subsidies is modest but foundational. Healthcare is the wild card and is defended on other grounds. That is enough to support the paper's claim to be a serious deficit-reduction framework and to bend the debt-to-GDP path downward, without pretending to a precision it does not have.

On the Uncertainty

Every number here is uncertain, and that is not a weakness to apologize for but a fact the professionals state plainly. CBO itself, when illustrating deficit reduction, uses round targets and reports results across a range of smaller, medium, and larger effects, because the underlying economic relationships are genuinely uncertain.16 Revenue estimates in particular depend on how people respond, and a code that taxes realization more heavily will see less realization, so static figures overstate the take. The purpose of this appendix is not to win an argument about a specific number. It is to show that the paper has weighed magnitude and direction honestly, that its largest claims rest on figures the official scorekeepers have already published, and that the whole is designed to move the country's finances in the right direction on its own terms. The specific numbers are exactly the thing a real legislative process, with CBO and JCT scoring, exists to settle.

Notes

  1. 2025 Social Security Trustees Report and subsequent SSA projections: the retirement (OASI) trust fund is projected to be depleted in the early 2030s, at which point continuing revenue would cover roughly 77 percent of scheduled benefits, an automatic reduction of about 23 percent. ↩

  2. Per the SSA Office of the Chief Actuary and independent analyses of the 2026 projections, eliminating the payroll cap without crediting additional benefits closes roughly 58 percent of the 75-year shortfall. ↩

  3. 2026 ACA marketplace benchmark premiums rose more than 20 percent on average, the largest increase since 2018; with enhanced premium tax credits lapsing, average out-of-pocket premium payments were projected to more than double. ↩

  4. KFF 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey: average annual family premium of $26,993, of which workers contributed an average of $6,850, with employers paying the remainder. ↩

  5. Adapts the recapture framework of IRC §2032A, which defers tax for family farms and closely held businesses on the condition that heirs continue operating them, with a ten-year recapture period. ↩

  6. Under current law, an asset's cost basis resets to market value at death (the "step-up in basis"), erasing accrued gains from taxation. ↩

  7. The United States and Eritrea are the only two countries that tax on the basis of citizenship rather than residence. The residence-based direction tracks the Residence-Based Taxation for Americans Abroad Act, which as of 2026 has bicameral sponsorship. ↩

  8. NATO and Atlantic Council data, 2025: European allies and Canada increased defense spending by roughly 20 percent year-over-year, and Norway became the first European ally to exceed U.S. per-capita defense spending. At the 2025 Hague Summit, allies committed to a path toward 5 percent of GDP by 2035. ↩

Appendix Notes

  1. Congressional Budget Office, Budget and Economic Outlook, 2025: the federal deficit is approximately $1.9 trillion, and debt held by the public is projected to reach about 118 percent of GDP within roughly a decade under current law. ↩

  2. CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2025 to 2034, Option 51, "Change the Taxation of Assets Transferred at Death." A related proposal to tax capital gains as ordinary income and make death a realization event appeared in the FY2025 President's Budget as a major revenue item. ↩

  3. CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit, Option 45, "Increase Individual Income Tax Rates on Ordinary Income"; a related proposal to raise the top rate to 39.6 percent was scored by CBO at roughly $191 billion over ten years. ↩

  4. CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit, Option 47, "Raise the Tax Rates on Long-Term Capital Gains and Qualified Dividends," and Option 51. The paper's graduated-inclusion scale is a broader version of these. ↩

  5. Analyses of CBO's Options for Reducing the Deficit report roughly $900 billion or more in ten-year savings from options that reduce the defense budget, including through greater reliance on allied capabilities. ↩

  6. CBO and the Social Security Trustees estimate that eliminating or raising the payroll-tax cap raises revenue in the trillions over a decade; the OASDI program faces a ten-year shortfall on the order of $2.6 trillion, which such changes are dedicated to closing. This revenue is off-budget and does not reduce the general-fund deficit. ↩

  7. CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit, "Reduce Tax Subsidies for Employment-Based Health Insurance," estimated at roughly $900 billion over ten years. ↩

  8. CBO, "The Macroeconomic and Budgetary Effects of an Illustrative Policy for Reducing the Federal Budget Deficit," which models a round-number deficit-reduction path and reports results across a range of assumptions. ↩

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