Update to Architecture Edit: Correction: the title shows $1.32M, an earlier estimate. A recalibration of the issuance model tightened the headline figure to $1.29M. Used throughout below and in the papers. The mechanism and conclusions are unchanged.
The median American household reaches retirement with roughly $260,000 in actual wealth, including pension value. A 95-year counterfactual simulation of the Citizens Standard framework, run against actual US economic data from 1960 to 2025, produces a Stable Floor at retirement of $1.29 million in 2025 real dollars for the earliest cohort. That’s about 5× the median American’s actual retirement outcome.
The mechanism is straightforward. Every citizen receives two deposits:
– K1 at birth: 2.5% of GDP per capita
– K2 annually: calibrated to real economic growth
Both route into a locked, total-market equity index account — the Stable Floor — that compounds until age 65. It cannot be withdrawn early, charged excessive fees, or panic-sold during downturns. Long-horizon equity compounding, structurally enforced.
95% of the terminal value comes from compound equity returns. Only 5% is the deposited principal.
This is the exact asset class wealthy families have always used to build generational wealth: early equity positions, long time horizons, no withdrawal pressure. The reason ordinary citizens don’t have it isn’t that it’s impossible. It’s that newly created money currently flows to financial institutions and bond holders first, not citizens. The Citizens Standard is a proposal to change that allocation rule constitutionally, not through discretionary policy.
The simulation covers four cohorts born 1960–1990, stress-tested against Depression-era and stagflation-era equity sequences, with full Monte Carlo analysis. The median advantage ranges from 3.93× to 5.70× across all cohorts under central return assumptions and holds under bootstrap resampling of historical data.
The median gets \~5× more. The mechanism is equity from birth. The question is why this doesn’t exist yet.
Architecture: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6702518
Empirical: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6735078
Transition: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6810741
Follow the work: r/CitizenStandard
