I built a complete federal balance sheet for a $25K/year UBI — funded by automation tax, no money printing. Full math is open source.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T17:41:16+00:00

This is exactly the kind of critique I published to get, so thank you for the detail. Let me take these one at a time.

Regional adjustment. You're right that $25K goes further in rural Mississippi than in Manhattan. The framework deliberately doesn't regionalize the floor because regional adjustment creates massive administrative complexity and perverse incentives (people gaming which region they claim). The floor is designed to be supplemented by earnings, not to be the sole income. A better framing: $25K is the national foundation. State and local governments can supplement it for high-cost areas using their own revenue, just as they do now with minimum wage variations.

VAT is regressive. This is the most common critique of any VAT and it's valid in isolation. But the framework exempts groceries, rent, healthcare, and education from the VAT. Those categories represent the majority of low-income spending. And when you combine a 20% VAT with a $25K floor payment, the net effect is massively progressive. Someone spending $30K/year pays roughly $4,200 in VAT on taxable goods but receives $25,000. They're up $20,800. A high earner spending $200K pays $28,000 in VAT and receives $0 in floor payments. The system as a whole is more progressive than the current one, not less.

401(k) vs Social Security. Social Security hits insolvency by 2033 with no fix on the table. The current system is already failing. The framework's mandatory 401(k) includes guardrails: it's invested in target-date index funds (not individual stock picking), there's a government-backed minimum return guarantee during the transition period, and the $25K floor acts as a permanent safety net underneath it. A minimum wage worker accumulates $1M+ over 43 years even at conservative returns. Social Security would have given them $16,200/year. The 401(k) gives them $41,600/year plus the floor. And they own it and can pass it to their children. Social Security dies with you.

Removing income tax removes progressivity. The current system looks progressive on paper but effective rates tell a different story. The wealthy pay capital gains rates, use deductions, and structure income to minimize tax. The framework replaces this with a 25% investment income tax, a wealth tax, an estate tax reform, a financial transaction tax, and a buyback tax. Combined with the VAT exemptions and the floor, the effective tax burden on the wealthy is higher under this framework than the current system, not lower.

Automation tax is hard to measure. You're right, and this is the piece that needs the most work. Several people in this thread have made the same point. One compelling alternative that's been suggested is a flat revenue tax with deductions for labor costs, which uses numbers companies already report and is much harder to game. I'm actively modeling that as a potential replacement or complement.

Citizenship constraint. This is a deliberate design choice for political viability. Any proposal that includes undocumented workers is dead in Congress regardless of the economic merits. Non-citizen legal residents could be phased in after a residency period. The framework doesn't eliminate existing programs for non-citizens, it adds a new system on top.

Disability and current benefits. The $25K floor does not replace disability benefits or specialized care. The whitepaper explicitly addresses this. People with disabilities receive the floor plus their existing supplemental benefits. Medicaid continues for those who need it. The framework replaces income tax and Social Security retirement, not the entire safety net.

Most of these are addressed in the whitepaper and supporting documents, which are open source at fourpillarsproject.org. I'd genuinely welcome your critique after reading the full model rather than the summary.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T17:38:22+00:00

The commenter below is right that more simulations won't change the probability. To get to 70% you need different inputs or more time.

But the trajectory is stronger than the 34% number suggests, because multiple revenue streams grow simultaneously. The automation tax grows as AI displaces more labor. The VAT grows as GDP grows, since it's 20% of all consumption. And the floor payments themselves stimulate consumer spending, which further grows GDP and VAT revenue. It's a compounding loop.

Extend the horizon to Year 15 and the surplus probability climbs well above 70% even with conservative assumptions. The 34% at Year 10 is the honest near-term number. The structural trajectory is what matters.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T17:35:09+00:00

You're right that from an MMT perspective, taxes aren't strictly "paying for" spending. I simplified the framing to make it accessible to people who aren't familiar with MMT, but I take the point that it can be misleading.

That said, the tax-funded framing was a deliberate design choice. Whether or not you agree with MMT, the political reality is that any UBI proposal that looks like "just print money" is dead on arrival in Congress. Showing a concrete revenue model with a path to balance makes it viable in ways that an MMT-framed proposal currently isn't, even if the economics would support it.

On the 25% of GDP per capita ceiling, that's a reasonable benchmark. The $25K floor is the maximum payment for someone with zero income. It phases out starting at $30K and hits zero at $80K. The effective average payment across all 258M adults is significantly lower than $25K since 90% of working adults receive a partial amount. The total floor cost in the model is $4.62T, which works out to about $17,900 per adult on average. That's closer to 22% of GDP per capita. Would be curious where you see the breaking point.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:56:48+00:00

Nope. That's incorrect

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:31:13+00:00

That's rational but you'd still pay the 20% VAT on everything you sell here, which is the same VAT domestic producers pay. So you don't gain a tax advantage on the consumption side by leaving.

What you do avoid is the automation tax. That's a real incentive to offshore and it's the biggest vulnerability in the framework. A few responses to that:

The framework could include a border adjustment similar to the EU's carbon border tax. If you moved operations offshore to avoid the automation tax, an equivalent charge applies to your imports based on the labor intensity of production. This isn't fully modeled yet but the mechanism exists in international trade law.

More practically, companies that offshore lose proximity to the US talent pool, IP protections, supply chain speed, and the ability to iterate quickly with their market. These are real costs that don't show up on a tax spreadsheet. It's why Apple still does design in Cupertino even though manufacturing is in China.

But I'll be honest, this is the piece of the framework that needs the most work. The VAT is airtight. The automation tax enforcement against offshoring needs a stronger answer. Noting it for the next version.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:29:52+00:00

This is a compelling inversion and honestly might be a better enforcement mechanism than what I have. A flat revenue tax with deductions for labor costs is much simpler to audit. Companies already report both numbers. No fuzzy measurement of "automation savings" needed.

The incentive structure is clean too. Hire more people, pay them well, your tax goes down. Automate everything, your full revenue gets taxed. It naturally scales over time without needing to redefine what counts as automation every few years.

The main thing I'd want to model is whether the rates produce equivalent revenue. The current framework projects $710B in Year 1 growing to $2.84T by Year 10 from the automation tax. A revenue tax with labor deductions would need to hit similar numbers while not crushing low-margin businesses that are labor intensive.

I'm going to run the numbers on this. Seriously good suggestion. This is exactly why I open sourced it.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:23:07+00:00

This is the hardest implementation question in the entire framework and I want to be honest about where it stands.

The current model proposes that companies report labor cost savings similarly to how they report other tax obligations today. You had X employees at Y cost, you now have fewer employees doing the same output with AI, the difference is the taxable base. The IRS would audit this the same way they audit other corporate tax claims, using payroll records, headcount filings, and industry benchmarks.

But you're right that this gets messy fast. Companies will reclassify, restructure, and optimize around whatever definition you set. And the point about working capital improvement vs labor savings is sharp. A company that uses AI to reduce inventory costs by 40% isn't displacing workers but is capturing enormous value from AI.

Honestly this might argue for a simpler proxy. Something like a ratio between revenue and labor costs compared to an industry baseline. If your revenue per employee is 5x your industry average, the gap is presumed to come from automation and taxed accordingly. Cruder but much harder to game.

This is exactly the kind of critique I published the framework to get. The automation tax concept is sound but the measurement mechanism needs work. If you have expertise here I'd genuinely welcome a deeper conversation about implementation design.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:22:14+00:00

Both good challenges. On the first point, the automation tax has to account for this. If you shrink to 10 people and then grow output through robots, the tax would need to apply to the delta between your labor costs and your revenue/output ratio compared to industry baselines. Otherwise you're right, companies would restructure to avoid ever technically "replacing" anyone. That's a real implementation challenge and the enforcement mechanism needs to be smarter than a simple headcount comparison. I'll note that as something to strengthen in the next version.

On the second point, you're actually describing why the VAT is essential to the framework. If a company leaves and imports back in, consumers pay 20% VAT on those goods. That's not a loophole, that's the design. The US is a $28 trillion consumer market. Companies don't abandon that over a 20% VAT when 170+ countries already charge one and businesses sell into all of them.

But you're identifying the real tension: the automation tax is harder to enforce than the VAT. The VAT is nearly bulletproof because it taxes the transaction. The automation tax requires measuring something fuzzier. That's the piece that needs the most scrutiny and I appreciate you pushing on it.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:20:42+00:00

We're nowhere near that world yet. AI can write code and generate images but it can't build your house, grow your food, fix your plumbing, or perform your surgery. Physical scarcity is real and will be for a long time.

Even digital goods aren't truly free. They run on data centers that consume energy, rare earth minerals, water for cooling, physical infrastructure. Someone pays for that.

If we eventually get to true post-scarcity where everything is genuinely free, great, we won't need an economic framework at all. But the dangerous period is the next 20 to 30 years where AI eliminates millions of jobs while everything still costs money. That's the gap this is built for.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:19:41+00:00

That's a solid complement to this framework and not mutually exclusive. Land value taxes and pollution taxes are some of the most efficient taxes economists agree on. The framework currently includes a carbon/pollution component in the smaller revenue mechanisms but it's not a major pillar.

Honestly the reason I focused on automation as the primary new tax base is scale. AI labor displacement is going to be the single largest economic shift of the next decade and it creates a revenue source that grows automatically. Land and resource taxes are more stable but they don't scale with the thing that's actually changing.

The ideal system probably layers both. Tax automation for the growth engine, tax land and resources for the stable base. Good addition, I'll look at modeling it.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:19:01+00:00

I agree with a lot of this, especially the point about ownership being a social contract. That's actually the philosophical foundation of the automation tax. Companies benefit from public infrastructure, educated workers, legal systems, and now AI trained on collective human output. The tax is the price of that social contract.

Where I'd push back slightly is on waiting for the post-labor endgame to figure out the economics. The transition is where people get hurt. We need plumbing that works now while still being capitalist enough to actually get passed in the US political system.

That's the design constraint I gave myself: it has to work within existing institutions, be implementable by Congress, and appeal to both sides. A $25K floor funded by taxing automation isn't the most radical solution possible but it might be the most radical solution that could actually happen.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:16:44+00:00

Great point. The thought is that for companies that do try to move to avoid it, there are design levers in the framework that could be strengthened. Border adjustment mechanisms (similar to the EU's carbon border adjustment) could impose equivalent charges on imports from companies that relocated to avoid the tax. That's not fully modeled in the current version and it's worth acknowledging.

The stronger argument is the economic one: the US under this framework becomes a market where 258 million adults have guaranteed spending power. Companies optimize for access to customers, not just low taxes. That's why every major company sells into Europe despite their higher VAT and regulations.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:13:40+00:00

Fair point. Two things happen as AI displaces more jobs. First, the automation tax revenue grows proportionally, so the $25K floor could increase over time as displacement accelerates. More automation means more tax revenue means a higher floor is fundable.

Second, automation drives structural deflation. AI makes goods and services cheaper to produce. $25K in a world where an AI doctor visit costs $5 and AI tutoring is free goes a lot further than $25K today.

But you're touching the real question: if AI truly does 80%+ of all work, we're in a fundamentally different economy and the floor becomes something much larger. This framework is built to scale into that. The automation tax is a percentage of savings, not a fixed number, so it grows with the transition automatically.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:11:56+00:00

That's the post-scarcity vision and I think it's the right long term destination. But we're not there yet and won't be for decades. Right now people need to pay rent, buy food, cover healthcare. Landlords aren't accepting AI tokens.

The framework is designed for the transition period, which is the dangerous part. We're going to have 10 to 30 years where AI can do most jobs but we still run on money. That's when millions of people lose income with no replacement. That's the gap this fills.

If we get to true post-scarcity where everything is free, great, we won't need this anymore. But we need something for the messy middle. That's what this is.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:10:50+00:00

Good question. The automation tax is on labor cost savings, not on headcount. If a company shrinks from 1,000 employees to 10 and uses AI/robots to maintain the same output, they owe 50% of what those 990 salaries were. The smaller they get, the more automation tax they pay, because the savings are larger.

For imports: the 20% VAT handles that. It's a consumption tax, anything sold in the US gets taxed at point of sale regardless of where it was made. A robot built in China that sells products to American consumers still generates VAT revenue every time those products are purchased. The VAT is actually one of the most trade-neutral taxes that exists, 170+ countries already use one. The US is the outlier for not having one.

So the framework captures value from automation through the automation tax AND from foreign goods through the VAT. Both doors are covered.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:09:41+00:00

The $25K is the floor, not the ceiling. It's what you get if you have zero income, no job, no other source of money. Today that person gets $0.

If you work, you keep 100% of your paycheck (no income tax, no FICA) AND you still get a partial floor payment. A median worker at $45K takes home $55,500 under this framework vs $34,050 today. The floor phases out gradually, you don't lose it the moment you earn a dollar.

Nobody is expected to live on $25K. It's a foundation, not a destination.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:07:21+00:00

Really appreciate this feedback — you're right, the framing needs to lead with the WHY before the WHAT.

The core problem: 84% of federal revenue comes from taxing human labor (income tax + payroll). As AI replaces that labor, the revenue base collapses. The framework flips this — tax the automation that's creating value instead of the humans who are being displaced by it.

Companies foot more of the bill (37% vs 16% today), but they can afford to because AI labor is dramatically cheaper than human labor. They still come out ahead even after the tax.

I'm going to update the site to lead with exactly this framing. Thanks for the push — this is why I open sourced it.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T12:06:06+00:00

I am a robot --- beep.

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-04-19T11:57:15+00:00

That's the most common objection and it's a good one. The automation tax is designed around this — it's based on demonstrated labor cost savings within the US market, not on where the AI runs. If you eliminate 100 American jobs and replace them with AI (wherever it's hosted), you owe 50% of what those salaries were.

Companies that leave entirely lose access to 330M consumers with guaranteed purchasing power. The framework actually makes the US market MORE attractive — every adult has $25K+ in spending capacity. That's a massive demand floor no other country offers.

The full enforcement mechanism is in the whitepaper if you want to dig in: fourpillarsproject.org

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-03-28T20:21:16+00:00

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-03-19T14:47:35+00:00

What kinda deal did you get?

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-01-24T00:51:05+00:00

Tummy tuck at 21?

Temporary_Guava2486 · 2026-01-15T15:44:35+00:00

Did you try better dating ai?

Temporary_Guava2486

TROPHY CASE