what a permanent stimulus could look like, to ease us into UBI:

We should focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. The 2 dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply.

The amount of wealth available to capitalize the American Equity Fund would be significant. There is about $50t worth of value in US companies alone. This will at least double over the next 10 years.

There is also $30t of privately-held land in the US. Assume that this value will double, too, over the next 10 years. If we increase the tax burden on holding land, its value will diminish relative to other investment assets, which is a good thing for society because it makes a fundamental resource more accessible and encourages investment instead of speculation. The value of companies will diminish in the short-term, too, though they will continue to perform quite well over time.

Under the above set of assumptions (current values, future growth, and the reduction in value from the new tax), 10 years from now each of the 250m adults in America would get about $13k every year. That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it’s not, $13k will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services. And that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every year.

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