A New Deal
for a New Century
A Plan You Can Build From
This is not a manifesto to be admired and shelved. It is a working blueprint, written for two kinds of reader: the legislator who can turn a plank into a bill, and the community that can turn a demand into a movement. Every plank below is a direction, not finished statute — pair it with model language and an honest fiscal note before it becomes law.
Each provision carries small tags so you know where it lives and what to do with it:
Federal State Local — the level of government that can act. Legislate Organize Own — the lever: pass a law, build a coalition, or put a stake directly in people’s hands.
Two ideas run through all of it. First, ownership beats bureaucracy: wherever possible the plan hands people a direct stake — a dividend, a share, a deed, a contract — rather than another agency. Second, build it to last: §15 is devoted entirely to the guarantees that stop the next moneyed interest from quietly clawing it all back. We have learned the hard way that a reform with no lock on the door does not survive the first lobbyist.
An Honest Accounting
A strong country cannot stand on a hollow middle. For two generations the people who do the work have produced more and kept less, while wealth, security, and political voice have drained upward to a narrow few. This is not the weather. It is the result of choices, and choices can be remade. Before the remedy, the diagnosis — every figure here drawn from official or non-partisan sources, cited at the end.
The National Report Card
The engineers grade our infrastructure on an A–F scale — a C in 2025.4 Borrow their honesty and grade the whole country, then ask what the plan in these pages would earn instead. These marks are judgments, not measurements — but the gaps behind them are real and sourced throughout.
A Fair Share: Ownership, Not Handouts
The problem. As profits and asset prices soared, the share of national income paid to working people fell to its lowest level in over seventy-five years of record-keeping.2 The top 1% now hold nearly a third of the nation’s wealth — the most since records began in 1989 — while the bottom half hold 2.5%.1 America has more billionaires than ever (905, up from 66 in 1989) and a working majority with almost nothing saved.3 This is the seedbed of every other failure in this document: a hollow middle cannot defend a democracy, fund a government, or weather a storm.
A progressive wealth surcharge. A modest annual levy on net worth above $50 million, higher above $1 billion, with the proceeds ring-fenced for the programs in this plan — never the general fund.
Why it matters — a small charge on the largest fortunes funds a floor for everyone. The base is tiny: the top 0.1% holds more than the bottom half of the country combined.
Tax wealth like work. End the preferential rate that taxes investment gains below wages, and close the “stepped-up basis” loophole that lets dynastic fortunes pass untaxed at death.
Why it matters — a nurse should not face a higher tax rate on her labor than an heir faces on his inheritance. This single fix raises hundreds of billions without touching a working family.26
Tax the “buy, borrow, die” game. A levy on large loans taken against appreciated assets — the technique the ultra-wealthy use to spend billions tax-free.
Why it matters — the 25 richest Americans have paid an effective rate near 3% by borrowing instead of selling. Closing it could raise ~$276B over a decade.29
A National Ownership Facility. Federal financing and tax incentives to seed employee stock-ownership plans and worker cooperatives, so workers accumulate capital, not just wages.
Why it matters — the durable answer to inequality is not bigger checks but broader ownership. A nation of owners defends itself.
Baby Bonds. A seeded, government-managed savings account for every child, larger for those born with less, redeemable at adulthood for education, a home, or a business.
Why it matters — it hands the next generation a stake on day one. Like Social Security, a universal benefit builds a universal constituency to defend it (see §15).
A permanent, monthly Child Tax Credit, and a federal minimum wage indexed to cost of living and productivity — ending the freeze at $7.25 since 2009.
Why it matters — we have already run the experiment. The 2021 expanded credit cut child poverty to a record 5.2%; letting it lapse more than doubled it.37
Rebuild the Country
The problem. The engineers raised our grade to a C in 2025 — the best ever — yet still see a $3.7 trillion gap between what we plan to spend and what a state of good repair requires, with nine of eighteen categories stuck in the D range.4 Meanwhile China has built nearly 28,000 miles of high-speed rail; we have essentially none.32 Closing the repair gap is not charity to contractors — it saves the average household about $700 a year in breakdowns and delays.4
A ten-year National Reconstruction Program — a modern Works Progress Administration — rebuilding roads, transit, rail, water, levees, and schools, with hiring and apprenticeships aimed at the communities left behind.24
Why it matters — the original WPA left us roads and dams we still use ninety years later. This is how you make a country physically resilient and put millions to work at once.
Permanent, counter-cyclical funding — infrastructure money that does not expire on a political cliff and that ramps up in downturns.
Why it matters — multi-year projects die when funding lapses every few years. Predictability is half the battle.
A modern grid, universal broadband, and lead-free water. Harden transmission for electrification and surging demand, treat high-speed internet as the utility it now is, and replace every lead service line on a fixed timeline.
Why it matters — U.S. electricity demand is projected to grow 35–50% by 2040.34 The grid is the spine of every other ambition here, from clean energy to AI.
Build it here, build it union. Tie public construction money to domestic-content, prevailing-wage, and project-labor standards (enforced in §13–§14).
Why it matters — public money should build an American middle class, not the lowest bid’s profit margin.
Two Debts: National & Household
The problem. The country carries two debts. The national debt has passed $39 trillion — about 123% of GDP, the highest since World War II — with interest now topping $1 trillion a year, the third-largest item in the budget, ahead of defense.5,6 In 2025 Moody’s stripped the United States of its last AAA rating, the first downgrade in over a century.7 The household debt is the private mirror of public neglect: families owe a record $18.8 trillion, plus an estimated $220 billion in medical debt.8,9 When wages stall and the net frays, people borrow to stand still.
Stabilize through revenue and growth, not austerity. The pay-fors in §12 bend the debt curve while the investments here grow the economy that services it.
Why it matters — you cannot cut your way to strength. Debt is sustainable when it buys productive assets — people, grids, housing — and is paired with honest revenue.
End medical debt as a weapon. Bar it from credit reports nationwide and fund public buy-backs of distressed medical debt for pennies on the dollar.
Why it matters — no one should be bankrupted by getting sick. Medical bills remain a leading cause of household ruin.9
A public-option refinance for student and consumer debt at the government’s own cost of borrowing, plus a national usury ceiling on credit cards and payday loans.
Why it matters — the original New Deal capped what lenders could extract. Freeing families from debt bondage is itself a form of national strength.
One Person, One Voice
The problem. No reform survives a government the wealthy can simply buy back. Since Citizens United (2010), outside spending exploded from about $500 million in 2008 to $4.5 billion in 2024, with more than $1 billion in “dark money” from donors who never have to show their faces.10,11 Large majorities across every party say money has corrupted the system.11 This is the master lock: open it, and the rest becomes possible.
A constitutional amendment affirming that money is not speech and that the people may regulate election spending.
Why it matters — it is the only permanent answer to Citizens United, and an amendment is repeal-proof by design (§15).
Small-donor public financing. Multiply every modest contribution with public matching funds, so a candidate can win on $25 donations from constituents instead of $25,000 from interests.
Why it matters — it dilutes the mega-donor without banning anyone’s speech, and it works at every level of government today.11
Full disclosure and fair maps. End dark-money anonymity, hand redistricting to independent commissions, and modernize the FEC so it can enforce the law instead of deadlocking.
Why it matters — sunlight is the cheapest reform there is, and gerrymandering lets politicians pick their voters instead of the reverse.
Protect the vote. Automatic and same-day registration, restored federal voting-rights protections, and a national standard for accessible, verifiable, paper-backed elections.
Why it matters — a strong republic makes voting easy and counting trustworthy. Both, at once.
Government Is Not for Sale
The problem. Federal lobbying hit a record $4.4 billion in 2024, fielded by more than 13,000 registered lobbyists.12 The deeper rot is the revolving door: the official who writes a rule one year and is paid by the industry it governs the next. Corruption today is rarely a briefcase of cash. It is a job offer, a board seat, a quietly weakened standard.
Ban stock trading by members of Congress, senior staff, and their spouses while in office.
Why it matters — lawmakers should not profit from the laws they write. This polls above 80% across both parties — rare common ground.
Close the revolving door. Long cooling-off periods before officials may lobby the agencies they oversaw, and a lifetime ban on lobbying for foreign governments.
Why it matters — regulatory capture is how good laws are hollowed out after the cameras leave.
Enforcement with teeth and a Court that follows the rules. An independent ethics office with subpoena power and real penalties; a binding code of ethics and term limits for the Supreme Court; “legislative footnotes” disclosing who actually drafted a bill.
Why it matters — rules without enforcement are suggestions. Honesty has to be cheaper to keep than to break.
Energy Strength & Resilience
The problem. This is where falling behind becomes a national-security question. China now makes 92% of the world’s solar modules, 85% of its battery capacity, and two-thirds of its electric vehicles.33,34 After two decades of progress, U.S. emissions actually rose in 2025 as credits were cut and rules rolled back.13 And the bill arrives as weather: roughly $180 billion in climate-disaster damage in a single recent year, with insurers fleeing whole regions.20 Cheap, clean, domestic power is not a luxury — it is the foundation of a resilient economy.
A durable clean-energy industrial policy. Restore and lock in manufacturing and deployment incentives, treating cheap domestic energy as the central job engine of the era — and an all-of-the-above build including advanced nuclear and geothermal.
Why it matters — the country that builds the energy machines of this century leads it. Right now that is not us.
A Civilian Climate Corps — paid national service in resilience, wildfire prevention, restoration, and disaster recovery, in the lineage of the original CCC.24
Why it matters — it hardens the country against disasters and gives a generation of young people a paycheck, a skill, and a stake.
A national resilience standard and a public reinsurance backstop for grids, water, and housing in disaster-prone regions, plus a just-transition guarantee — wages, pensions, and retraining — for workers in legacy energy towns.
Why it matters — resilience means no community is left to face the storm, or the transition, alone.
The Intelligence Age: A People’s Stake
The problem. Artificial intelligence is built on the collective knowledge of humanity — our books, our code, our art, our labor — yet its gains are pooling in a handful of firms. The good news: even the industry now concedes the public deserves a share. In 2026 a leading developer proposed taxing AI use and building automatic safety-net “stabilizers”;15 a senator introduced a bill for an American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund — public equity and board seats in the largest AI firms;16 others proposed AI taxes and direct dividends.17,18 The question is no longer whether the public shares in the wealth, but who holds the pen.
An American Public Wealth Fund seeded by AI-sector equity and revenue, paying every citizen an annual dividend — on the proven model of Norway’s ~$2 trillion fund and Alaska’s decades-old citizen dividend.25
Why it matters — this is ownership, not bureaucracy. A universal dividend makes every American a direct shareholder in the future — and creates a constituency that will never let it be repealed (§15).
Automatic displacement stabilizers. Income support, wage insurance, and retraining that expand by formula when job loss to automation crosses set thresholds — and recede automatically as the labor market recovers.15
Why it matters — it adjusts at the speed of the disruption, without waiting for a gridlocked Congress to act each time.
Stop subsidizing the elimination of jobs, and pay people for their data. End tax rules that reward replacing workers, and build compensation and disclosure standards for the human work that trains these models.18
Why it matters — the tax code should not pay companies to fire people while taxing the wages of those they keep.
A note of caution. When the convergence comes from capital itself, welcome it — but keep the pen in public hands. A wealth fund the firms design will protect the firms.
Health Without Ruin
The problem. We spend more on health care than any nation on earth — $5.3 trillion, about 18% of the whole economy, some $15,474 a person — and get less for it.19,35 We are the only wealthy country without universal coverage, with 28 million uninsured.19 We rank near the bottom of the developed world in life expectancy and infant mortality.22,35 A country cannot be strong when getting sick can mean going broke.
Guarantee universal coverage through a strong public option or single-payer pathway, with automatic enrollment so no one falls through the cracks — and make the enhanced subsidies permanent now.
Why it matters — every peer nation guarantees coverage and spends less. Coverage is both a moral floor and a cost-control tool.
Negotiate drug prices in full and cap out-of-pocket costs for insulin, inhalers, and other essentials.
Why it matters — Americans pay multiples of what other nations pay for the identical medicine. Negotiation is leverage we refuse to use.
Invest in the care economy — home care, child care, and the underpaid (largely female) workforce that holds families up — as the infrastructure it is.
Why it matters — care work is what lets everyone else work. Treat it like roads and bridges, because it carries the same weight.
A Place to Live
The problem. The country is short roughly 7.1 million affordable homes for its lowest-income families — 35 exist for every 100 who need one.21 A record 22.6 million renter households are cost-burdened; the wage needed for a modest two-bedroom is $33.63 an hour, more than four times the federal minimum.20,21 More than 770,000 people are homeless — the most ever counted.20
A national social-housing program — build and preserve millions of permanently affordable, mixed-income, publicly or cooperatively owned homes.
Why it matters — the shortage is the root cause. You cannot subsidize your way out of a supply hole; you have to build.
Make rental assistance an entitlement — every eligible family actually receives it — paired with strong tenant protections and federal incentives to reform exclusionary zoning.
Why it matters — today most who qualify for help get nothing because the money runs out. A guarantee is a guarantee.
Housing First, and rein in the speculators. Scale the evidence-based path out of homelessness, and curb the bulk purchase of single-family homes by large investor landlords.
Why it matters — a home is the original asset that builds a family’s wealth. Wall Street should not be bidding against young families for it.
Education & Opportunity
The problem. A nation’s future strength is set in its classrooms, and ours are treading water. American fifteen-year-olds score at the middle of the wealthy-world pack in math — 465 against Singapore’s 575 — and the gap between our advantaged and disadvantaged students is among the widest anywhere.36 Yet the same data carries the good news: U.S. schools with low child-poverty rates rank with the best on earth.36 Our education problem is, in large measure, our poverty problem wearing a backpack — which is why this plank works in tandem with §1 and §8.
A national tutoring and literacy surge. High-dosage tutoring and evidence-based reading instruction in every school that needs it, funded federally, run locally.
Why it matters — high-dosage tutoring is among the best-evidenced interventions in education. This is the fastest route from the middle of the pack toward the front.
Free community college, trades, and apprenticeships. Two tuition-free years of community college or certified technical training, with apprenticeship slots tied to the §2 rebuild and §6 energy build-out.
Why it matters — the rebuild needs electricians, welders, and technicians by the hundreds of thousands. Train the people for the jobs the plan itself creates.
Pay teachers like the professionals they are. A federal salary floor for teachers in high-need schools, loan forgiveness for service, and a rebuilt pipeline into the classroom.
Why it matters — every system that beats us treats teaching as a prestige profession. None of them staff their schools on burnout and food-bank wages.
Universal pre-K and affordable child care (costed in §12), capping family child-care costs and paying the care workforce a living wage.
Why it matters — the achievement gap opens before kindergarten. Pre-K is the cheapest point of attack — and child care is what lets parents work.
Competition & the Curse of Monopoly
The problem. Markets only deliver for ordinary people when they are actually contested. Across industry after industry — groceries, airlines, hospitals, seeds, search, and now AI — a handful of firms set the prices customers pay, the wages workers earn, and the terms small businesses live under. Concentration is the quiet tax on everything, and it is also a political problem: the same giants that dominate a market dominate the lobbying ledger (§5).12 A New Deal that redistributes income while leaving monopoly intact is bailing a boat without plugging the hole.
Revive antitrust for workers and small business, not just prices. Judge mergers and conduct by their effect on wages, suppliers, farmers, and entrants — not consumer prices alone — and fund the enforcers to match the merger wave.
Why it matters — monopsony suppresses wages as surely as monopoly raises prices. The law already permits this lens; it needs the will and the budget.
Treat dominant platforms and AI giants as the concentrated power they are. Structural separation where a platform competes against its own dependents, interoperability mandates, and merger scrutiny for the AI stack — chips to models to clouds.
Why it matters — the §7 wealth fund shares AI’s gains; this plank keeps the industry itself open enough that there are gains to share and entrants to discipline it.
Free the worker and the owner. Ban non-compete clauses, guarantee the right to repair what you buy, and outlaw the junk fees that pad every bill.
Why it matters — tens of millions of workers are locked in place by non-competes; farmers cannot fix their own tractors. Freedom to move and to fix is competition policy for ordinary life.
How We Pay for It: The Full Ledger
A plan that will not say how it is financed is a wish. So here is the whole ledger — what the planks cost, where the money comes from, and how the two sides meet. The principle is the one that built the first New Deal and won the Second World War: ask the most from those who have gained the most, and treat the spending as investment in assets that pay the nation back. Every line is anchored to a scored proposal or official estimate (cited); figures are ten-year totals, and ranges are wide on purpose. Honest people disagree — the design should win the argument, not dodge it.
Side One: What the Plan Costs
| Investment (the plank it funds) | 10-year cost, anchored to |
|---|---|
| National Reconstruction Program — close the repair gap: roads, transit, water, grid, broadband (§2)4 | ~$3.7T |
| Permanent expanded monthly Child Tax Credit (§1.6) — JCT / Tax Foundation scores41 | $1.4–1.6T |
| Universal pre-K & affordable child care (§10.4) — CBO score of the BBB design, scaled to a decade42 | ~$0.7T |
| Baby Bonds for every child (§1.5) — CRFB score; fully offset by its paired estate-tax changes43 | ~$0.65T |
| Social housing build & rental-assistance guarantee (§9) — scaled to leading congressional housing plans and the 7.1M-home gap21 | $1.5–2.5T |
| Clean-energy industrial policy at IRA scale + Civilian Climate Corps (§6)14 | ~$0.8T |
| Education & opportunity: tutoring surge, free community college & trades, teacher floor (§10)36 | $0.3–0.5T |
| Universal coverage & drug-price caps (§8) — net federal cost is design-dependent; negotiation and coverage savings offset much of it19 | design-dependent |
| Enforcement & democracy infrastructure: wage-and-hour, inspectors, FEC, small-donor match (§4, §11–§14) | ~$0.1T |
| Gross investment, decade one | ~$9–10.5T |
Side Two: Where the Money Comes From
| Revenue source | 10-year estimate |
|---|---|
| Progressive wealth surcharge (net worth > $50M / > $1B)28 | $2.3–4.4T |
| Mark-to-market on the top 1%’s marketable assets (NYU Tax Law Center estimate)26 | ~$1.7T |
| Corporate minimum tax & offshore-profit reform27 | $1.0–2.0T |
| Restore top individual rates on incomes above $1M27 | $0.5–1.0T |
| Tax capital gains as income + repeal stepped-up basis26 | $0.3–0.5T |
| Tax borrowing against assets (“buy, borrow, die”)29 | ~$0.28T |
| Baby Bonds’ paired estate & inheritance reforms (covers its own line above)43 | ~$0.7T |
| IRS enforcement funding — collecting tax already owed | $0.1–0.4T |
| Subsidy clawbacks & automatic sunsets on non-performing corporate tax breaks (§13) | recaptured |
| AI-sector equity & fees into the Public Wealth Fund (§7)16 | scaling |
| Direct revenue, decade one | ~$7–11T |
The Balance
How the Two Sides Meet
Gross investment of ~$9–10.5T against direct revenue of ~$7–11T. At the midpoints the ledger roughly balances; at the cautious end, a gap of $1–2T over the decade remains — and is closed by the second column of the books, the returns: childhood poverty alone drains an estimated $800B–$1.1T from the economy every year, and the credit that halves it costs a seventh of that;44 infrastructure repair returns ~$700 per household per year;4 we overspend the rich-world average on health by roughly 8% of GDP for worse results — the largest pool of recapturable waste in the budget;19,35 and every point of growth from a healthier, better-trained, better-housed workforce services the debt that remains. That is why §3’s debt path bends down, not up: the plan is a balance sheet, not a tab. The sequencing in §17 matters — revenue and enforcement first, the great builds phased over the decade.
The Honest Counterargument
Skeptics are right about three things, and the design answers each. Wealth taxes can underperform their projections as the wealthy reorganize their affairs — so this plan leans on broad bases and few loopholes over sky-high headline rates, and pairs the wealth surcharge with mark-to-market and the “buy-borrow-die” fix that are harder to dodge.28 Some measures face constitutional challenge — so the plan advances several revenue tracks at once rather than betting on one. And no tax on the top alone funds a European-style state — true, which is why the larger share of the work here is done by growth and savings: a healthier, better-housed, better-skilled workforce, and the trillions wasted on medical overspending and infrastructure breakdown recaptured.28,19
Keeping People Honest: Contracts & Accountability
The problem. Every promise in this plan can be hollowed out at the point of the contract. Governments hand out subsidies with no strings; companies pocket the money and break the promises; penalties are so small they are treated as the cost of doing business. This is the chapter that makes the rest real. It is not a new bureaucracy — it is teeth on the rules we already pretend to have.
Money-back guarantees on public money. Every subsidy, tax break, and grant carries binding job, wage, and investment targets — and automatic clawbacks if they are missed. No performance, no payment.
Why it matters — communities routinely give away fortunes for jobs that never arrive. A clawback turns a gift into a contract.
Binding Community Benefit Agreements. Major public spending and permits come with enforceable agreements — local hiring, wages, environmental terms — that the community itself can sue to enforce.
Why it matters — a benefit no one can enforce is a press release. Standing to sue is what makes a promise binding.
Penalties that exceed the gain. Treble damages for cheating the public, personal liability for executives who direct it, and debarment — repeat violators barred from future public contracts.
Why it matters — honesty must be cheaper than fraud. When the fine is smaller than the profit, the fine is just a license.
Open contracts & public scorecards. Publish every public contract, every subsidy, and a plain-English scorecard of promised-versus-delivered jobs and wages for each project.
Why it matters — backsliding thrives in the dark. A scorecard everyone can read is the cheapest watchdog there is.
Whistleblower bounties & independent inspectors. Reward and protect those who expose fraud; fund inspectors general and enforcement units with subpoena power that report to the public, not the contractor.
Why it matters — the people closest to the fraud are the cheapest enforcers, if you protect and reward them.
Sunset the giveaways, not the guarantees. Corporate tax breaks expire automatically unless they prove their return; the public guarantees in this plan do not (see §15).
Why it matters — this asymmetry is deliberate. The burden of proof belongs on the subsidy, not on the citizen.
Pay for Labor, and Pay It Fairly
The problem. The collapse of the labor share of income2 is the collapse of worker bargaining power. And the floor itself is routinely robbed: an estimated $50 billion a year is stolen from workers through wage theft — more than all robberies, burglaries, and car thefts combined — and less than 3% is ever recovered.30,31 Penalties are so weak that cheating is just a business model. A plan that redistributes income without rebuilding worker power is a leaky bucket.
Wage theft is theft. Criminal liability for serial offenders, automatic treble back-pay, personal liability for the executives who order it, and full funding for the wage-and-hour investigators who catch it.
Why it matters — if you stole $50 billion at gunpoint it would be the crime of the century. Stolen from a paycheck, it is barely prosecuted.30
Prevailing wage and project-labor agreements on every public dollar. Public money builds at a fair wage with a fair contract, or it does not build.
Why it matters — taxpayer money should raise the wage floor, not bid it down to the cheapest, most exploitative contractor.
Restore the right to organize. Ban captive-audience meetings, impose real penalties for illegal retaliation, and guarantee first-contract arbitration so a won election actually yields a contract.
Why it matters — union workers suffer far less wage theft because they have the power to stop it. Organized labor is self-enforcing accountability.31
Sectoral bargaining and portable benefits. Set wage and safety standards industry-wide so they reach workers who will never be in a traditional union shop; attach health, retirement, and leave to the worker, not the employer.
Why it matters — in a gig-and-contract economy, benefits tied to one job leave most workers with none. Make them portable.
No public money to law-breakers. Wage-theft, safety, and labor violations disqualify a company from subsidies and contracts until they are cured (enforced through §13).
Why it matters — we should not hand public dollars to the companies robbing the public’s workers.
Built to Last: Guarantees Against Repeal
Here is the hard truth the first New Deal teaches. The moment you win, the money at the top begins working to take it back — rarely in the open, because repeal is wildly unpopular, but quietly, by parts: a lapsed credit here, a defunded agency there, a loophole drilled at midnight. So the plan must be built to survive its own enemies. These are the structural locks — the reason Social Security has outlived ninety years of attempts to gut it, deemed important by 96% of Americans across every party.38,39
Make it universal. Programs that touch everyone — a dividend, a credit, coverage, baby bonds — build a near-universal constituency that defends them. Means-tested programs for “the poor” are easy to cut; programs for everyone are political bedrock.
Why it matters — analysts credit the “near-universal constituency” for why Social Security and Medicare are untouchable. Universality is not just fair; it is armor.38,39
Put ownership directly in people’s hands. A citizen’s dividend and individual accounts (Baby Bonds, the Public Wealth Fund) create millions of owners with a personal stake. Try repealing a check that arrives every year.
Why it matters — Alaska’s oil dividend has survived fifty years and is politically untouchable because every resident owns it.25 Ownership is the strongest lock of all.
Lock the foundations in the Constitution. The deepest reforms — money is not speech (§4), the right to vote, the public’s stake — belong in constitutional amendments that no single Congress or Court can undo.
Why it matters — an amendment is the one lock a future special interest cannot pick with a simple majority.
Independent, ring-fenced trust funds. Run the Public Wealth Fund and the dedicated revenues through trust funds with independent boards and lockbox rules — insulated from raids on the general budget, like the Federal Reserve and Social Security trust funds.
Why it matters — money in a lockbox with its own board is far harder to divert than a line item renegotiated every year.
Index everything, and require a supermajority to cut. Tie benefits and wage floors to inflation and productivity so they cannot be eroded by neglect, and require a supermajority to reduce core guarantees.
Why it matters — the favorite repeal tactic is doing nothing while inflation quietly shrinks a benefit. Indexing kills that move.
Give citizens standing to enforce. Write a private right of action into every guarantee, so the public can sue to defend it when a captured agency will not.
Why it matters — if enforcement depends only on the regulators, capture defeats the law. Hand the people the key themselves.
Spread it across the federal map. Build the same guarantees into state constitutions and city charters, so they cannot be killed in a single stroke in Washington.
Why it matters — fifty locks are harder to break than one. Federalism, used deliberately, makes a reform redundant and resilient.
What Everyone Gains — and What Inaction Costs
A real New Deal is not a transfer from one group to another. It is a floor that lifts the whole house. The same investment that rescues a working family steadies the business that needs customers, the town that needs workers, and the government that needs a tax base. And the choice is not between this plan and a comfortable status quo — the status quo is itself a decision, with a price that compounds every year we refuse to pay it.
Two Futures
Doing nothing is not neutral. Every trend in §00 keeps running. One picture: the road we are on, set beside the road we could choose.
What’s In It for Everyone
Name your community; here is your share. Universality is not only fair — it is the reason the plan endures. A reform everyone gains from is a reform no narrow interest can quietly repeal (§15).
Wages indexed so they stop falling behind, a monthly child credit that already cut child poverty in half, and a paycheck made whole by treating wage theft as a crime. §1.6 · §14.1
Lower health and housing costs, relief from medical and student debt, and a direct share in the national wealth fund. §3 · §7.1 · §8
Baby bonds that mature into a down payment or a degree, affordable homes, a Climate Corps paycheck, and a yearly dividend. §1.5 · §6.2 · §7.1
Child poverty cut by half — proven, not promised — child care treated as infrastructure, and stronger schools. §1.6 · §8.3
Benefits locked against quiet cuts and indexed to inflation, capped drug prices, and a funded care economy. §8.2 · §15.5
Universal broadband, fixed roads and water, clean-energy factories and jobs in your own county, and hospitals that stay open. §2.3 · §6.1 · §8.1
Social housing, fast transit and rail, and lead-free water in every tap. §2 · §9.1
Customers with money to spend, portable benefits so you can compete for talent, and a level field against law-breaking rivals. §14.4 · §14.5
The right to organize, industry-wide wage standards that reach you even outside a union, and prevailing wage on every public dollar. §14
Jobs in the rebuild and the Climate Corps, guaranteed coverage and housing, and a resilient home front. §2.1 · §6.2 · §8 · §9
Usury caps, medical debt struck from your credit report, and a dividend you can count on every year. §3.2 · §3.3 · §7.1
Clawbacks so subsidies actually deliver, automatic sunsets on corporate giveaways, a stabilized debt, and waste recaptured. §3.1 · §12 · §13
A domestic industrial base, cheap clean power, public R&D, and a market full of paying customers. §6.1 · §7
A stable, high-demand economy, social peace, resilient infrastructure, and a workforce that is healthy, skilled, and housed. Broad prosperity is the best business climate there is.
The dividend, the broadband, the fixed roads, and the clean-energy jobs do not check your voter registration. This plan is built in the statehouse and city hall as much as in Washington (§15.7) — so every community holds a piece of it, and a reason to defend it.
How This Becomes Real
A plan is only as good as the hands that carry it. Here is the work, split between the two readers this document is written for. The order matters: fix the democracy and the corruption first (§4–§5) — they are the locks on every other door — then the revenue and the wage floor (§12, §14), then the great build (infrastructure, housing, health, energy), with the Public Wealth Fund growing alongside.
For Legislators
- Treat each plank as a direction; attach model bill language and a CBO-style fiscal note before introducing.
- Lead with the bipartisan winners: the congressional stock-trading ban, wage-theft penalties, and subsidy clawbacks poll across party lines.
- Use the states as the laboratory: minimum wage, public financing, redistricting commissions, social housing, and clawbacks need no act of Congress.
- Build the durability in from the start (§15) — universal design, trust funds, indexing, citizen standing — not as an afterthought.
- Pair every spending plank with its enforcement (§13) and labor (§14) provisions in the same bill, so the guarantee and its teeth pass together.
For Communities & Organizers
- Put a candidate questionnaire in front of every office-seeker: a yes/no on the stock-trading ban, public financing, social housing, the wealth fund, prevailing wage.
- Where your state allows it, take winnable planks straight to the ballot — minimum wage, redistricting, and campaign-finance measures have won at the box.
- Demand a binding Community Benefit Agreement on every big project or subsidy in your town (the playbook from our data-center handbook applies directly).
- Build the coalition: labor, housing, climate, and good-government groups want the same locks. Organize them around the scorecard in §00.
- Name it plainly: something has gone wrong, you are right to feel it, and here is the path.
The Covenant, Renewed
My grandfather, the labor journalist Mike Quin, wrote through the strikes and breadlines of the 1930s in the plain conviction that ordinary people, organized and clear-eyed, are the only lasting check on concentrated power. He did not live to see how much of what his generation built would be quietly taken apart, nor how strange the new dangers would become. But the underlying fight has not changed. It is the same question the first New Deal answered and this century must answer again.
Does a great nation exist to enrich a narrow few, or to give a fair share — a real stake, a place to live, a voice that counts, work that pays — to the many who make its wealth and carry its weight?
This is not a plan to grow the government for its own sake. It is a plan to grow the country — to make it strong where it has gone soft, resilient where it has gone brittle, and owned by its people where it has been captured by its richest. It offers every community something concrete and asks every community to defend it. We have built it with the locks already on the doors, because we know what comes next: they will try to take it back. Let them find it built to last.
The people who wrote the first New Deal were told it was impossible, too.
Sources
- CBS News, “Wealth inequality just hit its widest gap in 3 decades” (Jan 2026), citing Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, Q3 2025 (top 1% 31.7%; bottom 50% 2.5%).
- CNBC, “Wealth inequality and the K-shaped economy” (Jan 2026), citing BLS labor-share data at a 75-year low.
- Institute for Policy Studies / Inequality.org, “Billionaire Wealth Concentration” (Sept 2025) — 905 billionaires, ~$7.8T.
- American Society of Civil Engineers, 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure — grade C, $3.7T gap, $700/household savings.
- U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, Monthly Debt Update (Mar 2026) — gross debt $38.86T.
- U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data; PrimeRates/Financer trackers (2026) — ~$39T, ~123% of GDP, >$1T interest.
- Moody’s Ratings, U.S. downgrade AAA→Aa1 (May 2025), via Financer.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt and Credit, Q1 2026 — $18.8T total.
- KFF / Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, medical debt ~$220B (2024–25).
- Brennan Center for Justice, “Citizens United, Explained” and “Fifteen Years Later” (2025).
- Center for American Progress, campaign-finance analysis (Dec 2025) — $4.5B outside spending; $1.3B dark money.
- OpenSecrets, “Federal lobbying set new record in 2024” — $4.4B; 13,000+ lobbyists.
- Rhodium Group, “Preliminary US GHG Emissions 2025”; Yale Climate Connections, “Where things stand in 2026.”
- (reserved)
- Quartz; InvestmentNews on OpenAI, “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” (Apr 2026).
- Truthout; New York Times — Sen. Sanders, American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (June 2026).
- Common Dreams — Warren & Casar AI-tax proposals (June 2026).
- Gizmodo — Alex Bores “AI Dividend” proposal (Apr 2026).
- CMS National Health Expenditure data; Peter G. Peterson Foundation (2026) — $5.3T, 18% of GDP, $15,474/person, 28M uninsured.
- Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, State of the Nation’s Housing 2025 — 22.6M cost-burdened; 770,000+ homeless; $180B disaster damages.
- National Low Income Housing Coalition, The Gap 2025 & Out of Reach 2025 — 7.1M shortage; $33.63 Housing Wage.
- Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker (Mar 2026) — U.S. life-expectancy gap with peers 3.7 years.
- Council on Foreign Relations, “A New Deal for the Twenty-First Century.”
- The Living New Deal, “Lessons for Today From The New Deal” (reviving the CCC/WPA).
- Precedents: Norway Government Pension Fund Global (~$2T); Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (Newsweek, Fortune, Tom’s Hardware, 2026).
- Peter G. Peterson Foundation; NYU Tax Law Center — capital-gains & mark-to-market revenue estimates (CBO +2pts = $103B; accrual on top 1% marketable assets ~$1.7T).
- Tax Foundation, federal budget tax-proposal scores (2024) — corporate & individual revenue ranges.
- Cato Institute (Pomerleau) & ITEP — wealth-tax revenue range and behavioral-response critique ($2.3–4.4T).
- Rep. Dan Goldman, ROBINHOOD Act — 20% excise on asset-backed loans, ~$276B/10yr.
- Economic Policy Institute — wage theft up to ~$50B/yr; $1.5B recovered 2021–23; CBS News wage-theft database.
- National Institute for Workers’ Rights — >$15B/yr stolen, under 3% recovered.
- (reserved)
- Brookings / CEPA — China shares: 92% solar modules, 85% battery capacity, ~66% of EVs.
- MIT Technology Review; ITIF — China clean-energy dominance; U.S. electricity demand +35–50% by 2040.
- OECD Health at a Glance 2025; America’s Health Rankings 2025; Commonwealth Fund — U.S. infant mortality 5.6 vs OECD 4.2; lowest life expectancy among peers.
- OECD, PISA 2022 Results; U.S. NCES — U.S. math 465 vs OECD avg ~472; Singapore 575.
- U.S. Census Bureau, Supplemental Poverty Measure — child poverty 5.2% (2021, expanded CTC) rising to 12.4% (2022).
- Brookings; AARP (2025) — Social Security deemed important by 96% across parties; cutting it opposed by ~88%.
- Bipartisan Policy Center — the “near-universal constituency” behind Social Security’s durability.
- McKinsey Global Institute, “Balancing the global books” — international top-1% wealth shares.
- Tax Foundation, “Making the Expanded Child Tax Credit Permanent Would Cost Nearly $1.6 Trillion”; JCT score via House Budget Committee (~$1.4T/10yr).
- Congressional Budget Office, “Economic Effects of Expanding Subsidized Child Care and Providing Universal Preschool” — $381.5B (2022–31, six-year design); scaled to a full decade.
- Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Cory Booker’s Baby Bonds Plan” — ~$650B cost over a decade, more than offset by ~$700B in paired estate/inheritance reforms.
- Fortune / 400 economists’ open letter; National Academy of Sciences — childhood poverty costs the U.S. $800B–$1.1T per year.
All statistics are paraphrased from the cited sources and current through reporting in mid-2026; refresh before publication. Letter grades in §00 and chart “Under the Plan” values are the author’s illustrative targets, not projections. The FDR-era framing references public-domain material; no words are attributed to Mike Quin that he did not write.