A lot of the recent surge in socialsm is understandable based on the blatant grift of the current administration. The economy doesn’t seem to be working for many. I wanted to share some thought about some potential paths to make everyone an owner in our society. I think it’s good on many levels. It gives people ownership and a stake in the society. It gives people hope that they’ll actually be able to retire someday. It’s not a perfect proposal. I am still working on my thoughts on this. But I think this is directionally useful to show people some of the current numbers for the stock market. It’s more useful than the “tax the billionares” rehetoric which doesn’t actually help the bottom 50%. This also proposes some solutions of how to help fix the Social Security insolvency issue. I hope to see more dialog on these issues. Thank you for reading.

This was all prompted by the below 3 videos along with many years of thinking on these topics.

AI and a Universal Basic Income. A note on the economy.

STOP Saving To Buy A House! Do THIS Instead

People Have No Idea What’s About To Happen…

“The only way to raise the poor from poverty is to give them better tools to produce more.” — something I wrote here back in 2018. I still believe it. This is the next piece of that argument.

Where we actually are

The U.S. stock market is worth somewhere around $75 trillion today. Depending on exactly what you count and which day you look, you’ll see figures from about $75 trillion up to $78 trillion. Call it $75 trillion to be safe.

There are roughly 343 million people in this country, about 277 million of them adults, and something like 255 million adults who are citizens. If you took that whole $75 trillion and split it evenly across every adult citizen, everyone would get about $294,000. At the higher market-cap number it’s closer to $306,000. So call the number roughly $300,000 of stock market wealth per adult.

That is a real number and it’s worth sitting with for a second. If every adult citizen owned an equal slice of American business, each of us would be sitting on about $300,000 in equity. Not income — equity. A claim on the machines, the brands, the buildings, the software, and the future profits of the entire American economy.

Now here’s the part that should stop you cold. Almost nobody has anything close to that.

That $300,000 is a mean — total pie divided by number of people. It is not what the typical person has, because the pie is not split evenly. It is split about as unevenly as it has ever been split in the history of the data:

• The top 10% of households own about 87% of all stocks.
• The top 1% alone own about half of all equities — more than the entire bottom 90% combined.
• The bottom 50% of Americans own about 1% of stocks, worth around $590 billion out of $75 trillion.
• Measured across all wealth, not just stocks, the top 1% hold about 32% of net worth, a record high, while the bottom half hold about 2.5%.

And ownership isn’t even that widespread to begin with. About 58% of adults own any stock at all, and that number recently ticked down. Most of the people who do own stock own it through a 401(k) and don’t own very much of it. The median American household has roughly $39,000 in financial assets outside their home. Among families that actually have a retirement account, the median balance is around $87,000 — but roughly half of households have no retirement account at all, and once you count those zeros, the median retirement savings across all households falls to somewhere around $27,000.

So we have a country where the average adult’s “fair share” of the stock market is $300,000, and the typical person’s actual share is a small fraction of that. That gap — between the mean and the reality — is the whole problem in one picture.

What I am not arguing

I want to be clear up front, because this is where most people get the argument wrong.

I am not saying we should take the top’s shares and hand them out. I said in 2018 that redistribution of wealth isn’t sufficient to fix poverty, and I still mean it. If someone built a company from nothing, added value people actually pay for, and got rich doing it, taking their stake away is both wrong and beside the point. It also doesn’t scale — as we’ll see in a minute, there literally isn’t enough at the top to hand everyone a comfortable life, and the moment you start confiscating you kill the thing that makes the pie grow in the first place.

I am also not arguing for equality. I don’t care very much whether the gap between the top and the bottom is wide. What I care about is the floor. The right question is not “how big is the gap” but “is the person at the bottom continually getting access to more — clean water, a roof, transportation, energy, the next useful thing?” If the floor keeps rising, the gap can stay wide and I’m fine with that. Inequality of outcome at the top is the price of a system that keeps inventing things. Inequality of access at the bottom is the thing we should attack.

So the goal isn’t to flatten anything. The goal is a shareholder society: an economy where everyone owns a piece of the productive machine, everyone therefore has a claim on what it produces, and — this is the part that matters most to me — everyone gets a vote through those shares in what the machine actually does. Especially as more and more of the work gets done by machines and fewer people are needed to run a company, ownership becomes the way ordinary people stay connected to the economy at all. If your labor isn’t needed, your shares are how you eat and how you’re heard.

Trump Accounts: a genuinely good start

This is why I’m actually encouraged by the new Trump Accounts.

Here’s the mechanism. Every American citizen child born from 2025 through 2028 gets a one-time $1,000 seed from the Treasury, invested in a low-cost, broad U.S. stock index fund with the expense ratio capped at 0.10%. Families can add up to $5,000 a year. At 18 it converts into a traditional IRA. The Treasury’s own projection is that a single $1,000 deposit grows to roughly $500,000 by age 60.

Structurally, this is the shareholder society in miniature. Auto-enrolled. Index-based. Every citizen kid holding a stake in American business from the day they’re born. It is the closest thing we’ve built to “everyone’s an owner,” and it starts people compounding at the one moment they have the most valuable asset of all: time.

I want to give it real credit, because the mechanism is right. But I also want to be honest about what it does and doesn’t do.

What the $1,000 actually becomes

Let’s be careful with the Treasury’s half-million-dollar headline. $1,000 growing to $500,000 over 60 years works out to about an 11% annual return, and that’s a nominal number — not adjusted for inflation. In the dollars you actually spend, it’s a lot smaller.

Let’s use an honest, conservative assumption instead: 7% return above inflation, which is roughly what U.S. stocks have delivered over the long run. A single $1,000 seed, left completely alone, no further contributions, grows to about $58,000 in today’s dollars over 60 years.

Fifty-eight thousand dollars. From one thousand, with nobody adding a cent.

Is that enough to live on? No. Not remotely. But here’s what should land: $58,000 from a single untouched $1,000 seed is more than what a typical American has saved for retirement after an entire working life. Among families that have a retirement account, the median is around $87,000 — but about half of households have no account at all, and counting everyone, the median retirement savings is closer to $27,000. So a birth seed that just sits there and compounds would end up ahead of where the typical household lands after 40 years of trying.

That comparison isn’t a brag about the seed. It’s an indictment of how little we accumulate — and it points straight at the real lever. The seed “wins” not because $1,000 is a lot, but because it gets 60 uninterrupted years of compounding, and most people never give themselves that. Time in the market is the scarce resource, and most of us start decades too late. Hold onto that, because it’s the key to the whole thing.

Setting the goal: what “enough” actually looks like

Let me put a real target on the table, because I think you have to name the goal before you can talk about how to reach it. And I want to be clear about what this next part is: it is a goal, not a demand that we get there tomorrow. If the honest path to this goal is funding today’s kids and letting them grow into it over a lifetime, that is completely acceptable. Goals are supposed to be out ahead of you.

Here’s the exercise. Pick the nest egg a person needs at 65 to actually live off of — on top of Social Security, which averages about $24,000 a year. Then work backward: every younger person should hold the amount that, growing at 7% a year above inflation, lands them at that target by 65. Retirees get the full amount, because they’re out of time to compound. I split the adult population into the normal age bands and ran it.

One thing I want to flag before the numbers, because it matters for the whole design: I’m leaning on Social Security to fill part of the floor, and Social Security is itself insolvent. Its trust fund is projected to run dry in the early 2030s, at which point benefits get automatically cut by roughly a quarter unless Congress acts. And the way we’ve always “fixed” it is the same move every time — take more from the people working now to pay the people retired now, then come back in a couple of decades and take more from workers again. That’s not a solution, it’s a treadmill. It’s an endless cycle of taking more from each new generation of workers to cover a promise the last generation never funded. The whole point of saving real, owned, compounding money for young people is to get off that treadmill — to fund the floor with an asset that grows on its own instead of a claim on the next worker’s paycheck. So when I put Social Security in the math below, read it as the shaky thing we’re trying to supplement and eventually lean on less, not the thing we’re counting on forever.

Target: $750,000 at 65 (throws off about $30,000 a year at a safe 4% withdrawal, so roughly $54,000 a year with Social Security — a genuinely livable floor):

Age band	Adults	Stake needed per person	Years left to grow	Cost of the band
18–24	31.6M	$38,200	~44	$1.2T
25–34	48.4M	$70,200	~35	$3.4T
35–44	45.9M	$138,200	~25	$6.3T
45–54	42.4M	$271,800	~15	$11.5T
55–64	45.2M	$534,600	~5	$24.2T
65–74	36.7M	$750,000	0	$27.5T
75+	26.8M	$750,000	0	$20.1T
Total	277M	—	—	$94.3T

Look at the total: $94.3 trillion. The entire U.S. stock market is about $75 trillion. So at a $750,000 floor, you cannot get there by dividing up what already exists — the bill is bigger than the whole pie. There isn’t enough equity in America to put every adult on a decent-retirement track today. This is my 2018 point landing with a number attached: there is not yet enough wealth, so the pie has to grow. You can’t slice your way there.

Run it leaner, at a $500,000 target (about $20,000 a year from the portfolio, roughly $44,000 a year with Social Security):

Age band	Stake needed per person	Cost of the band
18–24	$25,500	$0.8T
25–34	$46,800	$2.3T
35–44	$92,100	$4.2T
45–54	$181,200	$7.7T
55–64	$356,400	$16.1T
65–74	$500,000	$18.4T
75+	$500,000	$13.4T
Total	—	$62.8T

At $500,000 the whole thing costs about $62.8 trillion, which does fit inside $75 trillion. But notice what “fitting” would mean if you tried to do it by confiscation: you’d be handing over about 84% of the entire stock market. And even that extreme wouldn’t create equality — the remaining 16%, about $12 trillion, would still sit largely with the people at the top, which per person is still an enormous amount. So even the nuclear option leaves us unequal, just less concentrated than today. Which is fine by me — remember, I don’t care about the gap. But it also proves the point: distribution doesn’t even get you to equality, and there isn’t enough to go around anyway. Confiscation is the wrong tool.

Now compare either target to what people actually have — and here you have to be careful which number you quote, because there are two very different pictures. Among households aged 55–64 that have a retirement account, the median balance is about $185,000. That sounds like a real head start until you remember it leaves out everyone with nothing. And a lot of people have nothing: roughly half of American households have no dedicated retirement account at all. Count those zeros back in, and the median 55–64 household drops to somewhere around $71,000. Across all families of every age, counting everyone, the median retirement savings is closer to $27,000.

So take your pick, and both are worth saying out loud. The typical near-retiree who managed to save has maybe $185,000. The typical near-retiree including everyone who didn’t has more like $71,000. Against a goal of $500,000–$750,000, that’s a gap of three to four times for the savers, and seven to ten times once you count the people who reached the end of a working life with almost nothing. The second number is the one a floor is supposed to be about — the floor isn’t measured by the people who already have an account, it’s measured by the people who don’t. That is the size of what we’re trying to close. It’s big. But naming it honestly is the only way to size the solution.

And here’s the thing the table reveals that changes everything about how you’d do it: the young are absurdly cheap to fund, and the old are what breaks the bank.

• Everyone under 35 — about 80 million people, nearly a third of all adults — costs just $4.6 trillion to fully fund at the $750,000 target. That’s about 6% of the market for a third of the population.
• The three bands 55 and up cost $71.8 trillion — 76% of the entire market.

The whole difference is compounding. A 21-year-old needs only about $38,000 today to reach $750,000 by 65, because 44 years of growth does the other $712,000 of the work. A 68-year-old needs the full amount in cash right now, because they have no time left. Time does the heavy lifting, and the young have all of it. That is exactly why seeding people young is the smart, cheap, powerful move — and why funding today’s retirees is the expensive transition problem that no seed can solve. The goal points us straight at the strategy: start people at birth.

The six-point framework

Everything I’ve argued fits into one simple idea. The livability of your floor is basically a fraction:

Floor = income ÷ cost of living.

You raise the floor by pushing on either term. Raise what people can claim, or lower what living costs. Do both and they multiply — a modest stake in a cheap world beats a big stake in an expensive one. Here’s the whole framework in six points:

1. The measure is the floor, not the gap. Success is the bottom’s absolute access rising over time. Inequality at the top can persist; that’s fine. We watch the floor, not the ceiling.
2. Floor = income ÷ cost. Two levers, not one. Everything else is either raising the numerator or lowering the denominator.
3. Lower the denominator through disruption. New products win by competing against non-consumption — serving people who were priced out entirely, at a price point that didn’t exist before. That’s how the poor get their first car, their first clean water, their first anything. Cheap beats fancy when cheap reaches people fancy never could.
4. Where prices won’t fall, something is usually blocking them. When a necessity stays expensive decade after decade, the cause is almost always an artificial constraint — regulation, licensing, a credential monopoly, a subsidy — not physics. Find the constraint, remove it, and let disruption reach the good.
5. Raise the numerator through universal ownership. As automation thins out wages, shares replace the paycheck as the ordinary person’s claim on output. This is what Trump Accounts start — and the ownership stake matters most in exactly the categories where cost stays stubbornly high and disruption can’t finish the job.
6. The shares have to carry a real vote. Ownership without governance is just a dividend check. In an economy increasingly run by machines, whoever votes the shares runs everything — so the vote has to reach the actual citizen. (More on how below.)

Raising the income side: seed the kids

The income lever is ownership, and the model above already told us the smart way to do it: fund people when they’re young and let time do the work. So let’s cost that out honestly, because the number is genuinely surprising.

I ran the compounding: $18,000, invested once at 7% above inflation, grows to about $1 million in 60 years. One deposit. In today’s dollars. A newborn seeded with $18,000 would retire a millionaire in real purchasing power, without another cent added, without depending on whether their parents could afford to contribute.

Let me be clear that I’m using $18,000 as a modeling number, not a proposal I’m ready to plant a flag on. Honestly, I suspect it’s too much — it’s the figure that fully funds a $1-million outcome from a single deposit, so think of it as the upper end of the range, the “what would it take to do the whole job at birth” number. The real program probably lands well below it. But it’s worth pricing out the full version, because the total is smaller than you’d guess.

So what would it cost to seed every American child at that level? About 3.6 million babies are born in this country each year. At $18,000 each, that’s roughly $65 billion a year.

Hold that up against the federal budget, which ran about $7 trillion last year. Sixty-five billion is a bit under 1% of what the government already spends. Even the maximum version of this idea — full funding to a million-dollar outcome — costs less than a penny on the federal dollar. The current $1,000 Trump Account seed, by comparison, runs about $3.6 billion a year for a birth cohort and grows to that $58,000 we talked about. So the whole realistic range, from the $1,000 we’re already doing up to the $18,000 that finishes the job, fits between a rounding error and 1% of the budget.

But the budget isn’t even the right yardstick. The right comparison is the retirement promise we’ve already made and haven’t funded. Social Security’s unfunded obligation — the gap between what it’s promised and what it’s projected to collect — is about $29 trillion over the next 75 years in present-value terms, and by the infinite-horizon measure closer to $73 trillion, roughly twice the size of the entire economy. Per household, the 75-year shortfall works out to about $192,000. The trust fund is projected to run dry around 2033, at which point benefits get automatically cut by roughly a quarter unless Congress acts.

That is the number to weigh a seed program against. We are already on the hook for tens of trillions in an unfunded, pay-as-you-go promise — one where today’s taxes pay today’s benefits and the shortfall gets pushed onto future workers. A seed account is the opposite kind of obligation: it’s pre-funded and compounding, a real asset that grows on its own and eventually needs nobody to tax. Sixty-five billion a year is about two-tenths of one percent of the $29 trillion hole we’re already standing in. So the honest question isn’t “can we afford to seed kids” — we’re already committed to something vastly larger and shakier. The question is whether it makes sense to build a small, funded, self-growing stake alongside the unfunded one, and over time lean more on the thing that pays for itself. I think that’s at least worth a serious argument.

This is the cheap end of the income lever, and it’s cheap for one reason: it uses the kids’ 60 years of compounding, so a little money now does the work that would cost a fortune later. It does not fund today’s retirees — that’s the hard transition problem, where the existing safety net and a growing pie have to carry the load. But for everyone not yet born, or newly born, a real ownership stake is within reach for a fraction of what we already spend, and a fraction of what we’ve already promised.

I’m going to leave the hard question of exactly where the money comes from for another day — this article is about the goal and the shape of the solution, not the appropriations fight. It’s a real question and it deserves its own piece; for now, take the seed as a line item to be funded like any other priority, and let’s not pretend I’ve solved that part here. What I’ll say is that the structure matters as much as the source: the growth should come from a broad, universal feed rather than from what each family can spare, and it should land in your own account, not one giant government pool. Norway built a roughly $1-trillion sovereign fund from oil that now holds around $200,000 per citizen — proof the scale is achievable. The difference in my version is that the shares, and the votes attached to them, belong to individuals, not to a fund that votes on everyone’s behalf.

This is also why the idea that we’re heading for a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia is wrong. I like Elon, but “we won’t need money” is a dumb prediction. There is always something genuinely scarce — the best land, the most skilled human care, the next thing nobody’s invented yet — and for whatever is truly scarce you need a price, and you need money to ration and signal it. Maybe most goods get cheap enough to feel free someday. But there’s always a residual, and money is how we handle the residual. The ownership stake exists precisely to give ordinary people a claim on that residual.

Lowering the cost side

Here’s the good news the income side needs: you don’t have to hit the full target if the cost of a decent life keeps falling. Remember the fraction — floor equals income over cost. Everything you knock off the denominator lowers the numerator you have to fund. If a decent life costs $400,000 to sustain instead of $750,000, the whole retirement model suddenly fits with room to spare. The two levers aren’t independent; cutting costs is what makes the ownership stake affordable.

And for a huge range of goods, costs have been falling, hard. Electronics, computing, information, communication, media — the price of all of it has collapsed. Things that were luxuries a generation ago are now in nearly every pocket in the country. Nobody took a rich person’s phone and handed it to a poor person. The price fell until it reached everyone. That’s the floor rising through disruption, exactly as point 3 describes — and cheap electric cars and automated transportation are the next necessity crossing from “priced out” to “everyone can have it.”

Now the bad news, and the real work. The categories that actually decide whether someone’s floor is livable — housing, healthcare, education, childcare and eldercare — have gone the other way. Prices there have risen for decades while everything digital got cheaper. If the floor is going to keep rising, these are the targets. For each one, the framework says: identify what specifically is holding the price up, and ask whether that constraint is captured or real.

• Housing. Mostly captured, not physical. Land near jobs is scarce, but the bigger driver is policy: zoning that bans density, lot-size minimums, parking mandates, permitting delays, reviews weaponized to block building. Construction is one of the only industries that got less productive over 50 years, partly because you can’t mass-produce a house when every town has different rules. The fix is nameable: factory-built and modular housing plus zoning reform. Our most winnable stubborn category.
• Healthcare. Part real, mostly captured. Yes, it takes highly trained people. But we cap the supply of those people (residency slots, scope-of-practice laws that stop nurses and pharmacists from doing what they’re trained for), we hide prices so the market can’t work, and we tie insurance to employers so nobody sees the cost. The disruption path — pushing care down the chain from specialist to GP to nurse to app to self-care — mostly exists. What’s missing is permission.
• Education. Largely captured and already half-disrupted. The information is free now. What costs money is the credential, protected by accreditation and inflated by subsidized loans. The fight is whether an alternative credential can beat the incumbent’s signal.
• Childcare and eldercare. The most genuinely real constraint. A lot of the value is literally a human being present and paying attention, and that resists automation by its nature. Some cost is regulatory, but even stripped down it’s people-heavy.

See the pattern? The categories that stayed cheap were the ones we allowed to be disrupted. The ones that got expensive are the ones where the cheaper competitor is often literally illegal — you can’t build the dense housing, can’t let the nurse practice, can’t sell the un-accredited course. They’re expensive because someone captured the rules to keep them that way, not because we can’t make them cheaper.

That gives the two halves of the framework a clean division of labor, which is really the whole thesis in one sentence:

Deregulate to let falling prices reach the goods that are only expensive because the rules are rigged — and use the universal ownership stake to carry the floor across the few goods whose costs are genuinely, irreducibly real.

Disruption handles most of it. The shareholder stake exists for the residual — the human care, the truly scarce land, the physics floor on real things — that no amount of innovation drives to zero. That’s what the shareholder society is for. Not equalizing everyone. Backstopping the part of the floor that deflation can’t reach, and giving every citizen a vote in the machine while we’re at it.

Index funds don’t have to take away your vote

Here’s how voting works today. If everyone owns index funds, the vote gets swallowed by the big asset managers, because the fund is the legal shareholder of record and the fund company casts all the proxies. That’s a real concentration of power — a handful of firms voting a huge share of corporate America on everyone else’s behalf. But fixing it is simple arithmetic.

If you own an index fund and that fund holds 8% of its money in Nvidia, and you have $100,000 in the fund, then you own $8,000 of Nvidia. Simple as that. So you should get to vote $8,000 worth of Nvidia shares. Your ownership looks through the fund to the underlying companies, and your vote looks through right along with it, in exact proportion to what you actually own. Do that across every holding and every fund, and every shareholder — down to the person with a few thousand dollars in a Trump Account — votes their real, proportional slice of every company they’re invested in.

That’s the whole principle. It’s not a new theory of corporate law; it’s just pass-through voting, weighted by the dollars you hold. The asset manager stops being the one who decides and goes back to being what it should be — a middleman that administers your shares and casts the votes you direct.

And the mechanics are straightforward. Brokerages already know exactly who owns what, down to the share, across hundreds of millions of accounts — they have to, that’s the whole business. The look-through is grade-school arithmetic: your share of the fund times the fund’s share of each company. The plumbing to record it and pass the votes along already exists; the big managers have even started offering “voting choice” programs that do a version of it. The only thing missing is the decision to make it the default. You look through the fund. Your money’s already there; the vote should follow it.

Where this leaves us

Put it together and it’s not complicated, even if it’s ambitious:

Set the goal honestly — a real, livable ownership stake for every citizen, on the order of half a million to three-quarters of a million dollars at retirement. Accept that we can’t hand that out today, because there isn’t enough and confiscation would wreck the engine anyway. Then reach the goal from three directions at once. Seed the young, where even the full-freight version — enough to grow into a real million by retirement — costs well under 1% of the budget a year and a rounding fraction of the tens of trillions we’ve already promised through Social Security, because time does the work. Grow the pie, so there’s more to own tomorrow than there is today. And drive down the cost of living, breaking the captured rules that keep housing, care, and schooling artificially expensive, so that “enough” becomes a smaller number. Give every one of those shares a real, proportional vote. And let the ownership stake carry the floor across the handful of things that stay genuinely scarce.

We don’t win by making others lose. We win by raising the floor from both sides at once — driving the price of the next useful thing down until it reaches everyone, and giving every person a real, voting stake in the machine that makes it. The $1,000 seed is a start. Now let’s set the real goal, and go finish it.