Public Cash MoneyCS — The Citizens Standard · Chapter 3: THE CITIZEN FLOOR.
A Locked, Heritable Capital Stake for Every Citizen — With the General-Equilibrium Economics Done Honestly
Chapter 2 specified where the money budget goes. This chapter specifies what it becomes: the Stable Floor. It also does something most universal-program proposals refuse to do — it solves for the return the program itself pushes down by existing, and reports the smaller, honest numbers.
Neo-Solon · citizensstandard.org · 2026 · Open source. Peer review actively welcomed.
Abstract
The Stable Floor is an individually owned, locked capital account: seeded at birth by the citizenship deposit (K1), grown annually by the growth channel (K2), invested in productive capital, untouchable until retirement, and inherited as principal at death. The citizen lives on its yield and bequeaths the stake. It is not a transfer program; it is the answer to Chapter 1’s distribution question stated as property. This chapter reports what the floor accumulates to over a working life — after correcting for the fact that a program in which every citizen owns capital lowers the return on capital for everyone, including itself. At the flagship calibration the honest figure is a floor of roughly $413,000 in real 2025 dollars per citizen at retirement, earned at a realizable return of 4.26 percent rather than the naive 6.67 percent, and we show the derivation, the band around it, and the two stress results that matter.
1. What the Floor Is — and Is Not
Each citizen’s floor account receives the K1 deposit at citizenship (~$2,250 at launch) and the equal K2 deposit every year thereafter ($769 per year in the flagship Mode B). The balance is invested in broad productive capital through a rule-bound structural buyer (Section 5), is locked — no withdrawal, no collateralization — until retirement, and passes to heirs as principal. The citizen retires on the yield and bequeaths the stake.
The floor is therefore not universal basic income, and the distinction is structural, not rhetorical. A transfer is an annual political decision about other people’s money; the floor is the citizen’s own share of the value of money creation, assigned once, constitutionally, as ownership. A transfer can be repealed by the next legislature. Confiscating forty years of an individual citizen’s accumulated property is a different act — legally, politically, and morally — and the architecture is built on that asymmetry.
2. The Naive Number, and Why It Is Wrong
Compound the deposit stream at the historical return on capital and the arithmetic is spectacular. Under the calibration this framework uses — capital share 0.35, capital-output ratio 3, depreciation 5 percent — the no-program return on capital is exactly 0.35/3 − 0.05 = 6.67 percent real. At that rate the flagship deposit stream compounds to well over half a million real dollars by retirement.
That number is wrong, and this chapter refuses to use it. A single saver takes the return as given; three hundred and forty million savers cannot. When the citizen accounts collectively accumulate a material share of the productive capital stock, the stock deepens, the marginal product of capital falls, and the return on the next floor dollar is lower than the return on the first. Any universal capital program that quotes the price-taker return is overstating its own outcome by construction.
3. The Realizable Return
The framework solves for the return the program actually earns. At the flagship configuration, citizen accounts mature to roughly a 25 percent share of the capital stock, and the realizable return at that share is 4.26 percent real — the naive 6.67 attenuated by the program’s own capital deepening. The mapping from ownership share to return is stated in closed form (a two-anchor deepening map that reproduces every configuration exactly; the derivation is executable in the replication package), and under the plausible range of the underlying parameters the return brackets to 3.30–5.03 percent.
At 4.26 percent, the flagship floor at retirement is approximately $413,000 in real 2025 dollars per citizen. The conservative Modes, which capture less of the budget and so depress the return less, land near $233,000 at 5.38 percent. The pure-dividend Mode builds no floor at all and delivers its entire benefit — roughly $75,000 lifetime — as current income instead. The trade among these is exactly the constitutional regime choice of Chapter 2.
One decomposition worth internalizing: at maturity, only about 19 percent of the flagship floor is deposited principal. The other 81 percent is compounding — the harvest on seed money that today is distributed to no one. The floor does not primarily redistribute existing wealth; it assigns to citizens the compounding that the present architecture assigns, by default, to proximity.
4. What the Floor Does to r − g
The most cited inequality mechanism of the last decade is the gap between the return on capital and the growth rate: wealth compounds at r while wages grow at g, and the gap widens the distribution. The standard remedies attack r with taxation. The floor attacks the ownership of r: when every citizen holds a capital stake, the r − g gap works for the median household instead of only against it. At the flagship calibration, broad ownership compresses the effective gap from 4.7 to 2.3 percentage points — not by making capital yield less to its owners, but by making everyone an owner. Distributionally, the framework’s modeled long run takes US wealth concentration from a Gini near 0.83 toward the low 0.70s — a large move by the standards of anything short of war, achieved without a wealth tax, because the instrument is assignment, not confiscation.
5. The Structural Buyer — Bounded by Construction
The accounts are invested by a rule-bound structural buyer that purchases broad productive capital on a fixed schedule. The immediate objection — the state fund eats the market — is answered with a bound, not a promise: the buyer’s steady-state ownership share is capped by the ratio of its inflow rate to the market’s growth rate, and at calibration it converges to roughly 9.8 percent of market capitalization against a ceiling near 19.7. The fund cannot run to the whole market; the arithmetic will not let it. Governance separation between ownership and corporate control is specified in the underlying papers.
6. Stress, Reported Honestly
Two results from the crisis analysis belong in any honest presentation. First, the locked floor carries sequence-of-returns risk: a crash in the final two years before retirement cuts a representative cohort’s realized floor roughly in half ($209,942 → $102,114) — a tail the smoothed central path conceals, and the reason the architecture pairs the floor with a glide-path and yield rules rather than a bare index holding. Second, the floor is remarkably insensitive to slow disasters: imposing a full lost decade of zero real growth on a mid-career cohort reduces the retirement floor by only about 4 percent ($209,942 → $201,368), because by mid-career the stock dominates the flow. The floor’s enemy is a badly timed crash, not a slow economy — and the mitigation is specified, not hoped for.
7. What This Chapter Does Not Claim
It does not claim the by-configuration returns are point predictions — they are general-equilibrium estimates from a stylized model, reported as such, with the closed form and the parameter band published. It does not claim the floor eliminates inequality; it compresses the wealth distribution’s monetary component and leaves the rest to the polity. And it does not claim the accumulation is free: the realizable-return correction is the cost, paid transparently, inside the model, rather than discovered later.
To confute this chapter: show that a universal capital program can earn the price-taker return at scale (the feasibility bound says otherwise), or reproduce the replication package and find a different floor.
The deposits are seed. The compounding is the harvest. Today the harvest goes to whoever stands nearest the money. The floor assigns it to everyone.
Coming in Chapter 4 — The Transition: the part every monetary proposal waves at and this one specifies — how to retire a 102-percent-of-GDP public debt as a fiscal burden, without default, austerity, or inflation, while the price level is held flat the entire way.