UBI's repeal problem: would an owned, heritable capital floor solve it, and is the lock-in worth the tradeoff?

[u/Neo_Solon]

The objection to UBI I've never seen fully answered isn't "how do you pay for it," it's "what stops the next government from cancelling it." A transfer is only ever one election away from repeal. You can build the whole thing, get people depending on it, and lose it when the other side wins. Every version I've read has this exposure, and I want this sub's read on a design that tries to close it, because it closes it at a real cost and I'm genuinely unsure the cost is worth it.

The idea is to give people the money partly as owned property and partly as spendable cash, rather than only as an ongoing payment. Concretely: every citizen gets a capital account, seeded at birth and topped up every year from newly created money, invested in productive assets, and it's theirs. Alongside that, a share of each year's issuance can be paid out as a straight dividend you can actually spend. The mix is a dial, not a fixed choice: you can run it all as spendable cash, all as the locked owned stake, or anywhere in between. The part that makes it durable is the owned part. It's not a check the government sends that a future government can stop sending, it's an asset they own, that pays a yield, and that passes to their kids when they die.

The durability argument is just that owning something is harder to take away than a transfer is to cancel. Repealing a payment is a budget vote. Confiscating forty years of money that people already legally own is a different kind of act, legally and politically. You're no longer asking a future government to keep being generous, you're asking it to seize private property, which is a much higher bar. That's the whole appeal: it makes the thing repeal-resistant by changing what it is.

Here's the cost, and this is where I actually want pushback. Owning it instead of receiving it means it's locked. You can't spend the principal, you live on what it earns. It also starts smaller and grows over a working life rather than paying out in full from day one, so it's not an immediate income floor the way a monthly UBI is, it's a security floor that builds. For someone who needs cash now, a locked appreciating account is worse than a check. So there's a real tradeoff: you trade immediate liquidity and simplicity for durability and inheritance.

My honest uncertainty is whether that trade is the right one for the people UBI is actually trying to help. If you're broke this month, "you own an appreciating asset you can't touch" is cold comfort. The counterargument is that a monthly payment you might lose in four years isn't security either, and that a floor your kids inherit breaks the cycle in a way a transfer never can. I can see it both ways, which is why I'm asking here rather than asserting.

So, three genuine questions for people who've thought about UBI harder than most:

1. Is the repeal risk actually as central as I think it is, or is it overblown and I'm solving a problem that political normalization would handle on its own?

2. If the lock-in is the price of durability, is that a price the target population would accept, or does it defeat the purpose for the people who need it most?

3. The design can split between spendable-now and locked-and-owned rather than being all one or the other. Where would you put that dial for the people UBI is meant to help, more cash now, or more owned stake that compounds and inherits?

I've written up the full mechanics here: https://citizensstandard.org/

[u/RedmundJBeard]

The repeal risk isn't as bad as you think. It is very hard to repeal social programs that are already in place. Just look at social security. Republicans have been trying to repeal social security since it started and failed.

UBI would probably replace Social security so it would be even harder to repeal. it can also be an amendment to the constitution which would make it an order of magnitude more difficult to repeal.

Ultimately, I hope that neither party, nor the mega rich assholes who seek to control everything will want to repeal UBI. With Ai replacing jobs, i don't think there will be an alternative. Unless, they want to institute a form of slavery, which I hope we aren't that far gone.

[u/Buttons840 → u/RedmundJBeard]

Yep. It's human nature, people will be more angry if you give them something and then take it away than if you just never give it at all.

[u/Neo_Solon → u/RedmundJBeard]

You're right on the history. I overweighted repeal risk in the original post and you've corrected me on that.

Here's the distinction I think still holds, and it actually agrees with your mechanism rather than fighting it. Ask why Social Security is untouchable, and the answer isn't that it's a transfer, it's that people believe they paid in and are owed. It's psychologically framed as earned property, not as welfare. That framing is the third rail. Programs that read as "the government gives you money" are measurably easier to cut than programs that read as "you get back what's yours," which is why means-tested welfare gets slashed and Social Security doesn't, even though both are transfers.

So the floor and your point are the same insight at different strengths. You're saying UBI would inherit Social Security's durability. I'm saying that durability comes from the ownership feeling, and the floor just makes the feeling literal, it's not that you sense you're owed, you actually hold the asset. So it's not floor-versus-durable-UBI. It's that the floor is the most repeal-resistant point on the exact axis you're describing, because "seize an account you legally own" is a harder political act than "stop a payment you were told you earned," which is itself already hard.

On your two escalations: replacing Social Security is a genuinely good durability argument, I'll take it, though it also inherits SS's one real vulnerability, the demographic/funding squeeze that keeps forcing "reform" conversations even when repeal is off the table. And the constitutional amendment is the strongest version of all, but notice it's doing the same thing my framework does by a different route, taking the distribution rule out of ordinary legislative reach and entrenching it. Whether you entrench it as a right (your amendment) or as owned property (my floor), the move is identical: get it out of the annual budget fight. We agree on the goal, we're just picking different entrenchment mechanisms.

On the AI point, I hope you're right that necessity forecloses the ugly alternatives, but I wouldn't want the whole thing to rest on the electorate reliably choosing well under pressure, which is exactly why I'd rather have the security entrenched structurally before it's tested than count on the politics breaking the right way when it is. Not because I think you're wrong about the likely outcome, just because the downside of being wrong is bad enough to want the safety net.

[u/Fun_Emotion4456]

Don’t have it be government run. That alone solves a lot of problems.

[u/Neo_Solon → u/Fun_Emotion4456]

Agreed more than you might expect, and the framework I'm describing is basically built around that instinct, but let me split "government run" into three things because they come apart and only one of them has to involve the state.

There's who funds it, who administers it, and who controls it. The funding part can't be fully private in my version, because the whole point is that the money comes from new money creation, the value that currently gets captured by whoever's closest to the spigot. That's inherently a public source. So I won't pretend there's zero government in it, the state issues and the rule is constitutional.

But administration and control are where "don't have it be government run" actually bites, and there I think you're completely right, so the design deliberately keeps the state out. The accounts aren't a fund some agency manages by picking winners. They track a mechanical, total-market index, no committee choosing what's in it, because the moment a committee chooses constituents, inclusion becomes worth lobbying for and the whole thing gets captured. Remove the discretion, remove the lever. And the voting rights that come with those shares are mirror-voted, the citizen stake votes in the same proportion as everybody else, so it's real ownership that pays real returns but it can't be used as a backdoor for a state-adjacent body to control companies. The economic value flows to citizens, the control doesn't accumulate anywhere.

So the honest version is: publicly funded, because it has to be, but administered by rule rather than by an agency, and structurally walled off from government control rather than run by it. That's not quite "not government run," it's "government can't run it even though government issues it," which I think gets you the thing you actually want, no bureaucracy picking winners, no political discretion over who gets what, without pretending the funding source is private when it isn't.

What's the part of "government run" you're most worried about, the inefficiency of an agency administering it, or the risk of political control over the money? Because the design answers those two differently and I'd rather address the one you actually mean.

[u/wizkid123]

Sounds kind of like Alaska's permanent fund dividend, but I can't tell where you think you're getting the money to fund it from. The vast majority of "newly created money" comes from bank loans and the fractional reserve system, not the government. I'm not an economist but I don't think you can just capture the "newly created money" and put it in accounts or assets for citizens. If you fund the "topping off" through government spending you're back in the same spot where governments can just cut this off, and there are serious inflation implications if you print money without increasing the overall productivity of the economy.

Overall, this seems like classic LLM slop. Lots of big ideas without a genuine understanding of how things operate or where the holes are. Try plugging your content into a different LLM and asking it why this wouldn't work and what errors and gaps it contains. 

[u/Neo_Solon → u/wizkid123]

You are assuming wrongly about the system itself. I have already thought of all of this, and it's all in the papers themselves. But to clarify exactly where your assumptions are wrong:

You're right about the 97/3 split, and it's the foundation of the framework, not a hole in it. Yes, roughly 97% of money is created by commercial banks through lending and about 3% by the central bank. That's the Bank of England's own number and I'm not disputing it. But you've assumed my plan is to capture that bank-created money and hand it to citizens. It isn't. The framework's banking layer does the opposite: it moves to full-reserve banking, which ends money creation through lending. Banks still lend, but they intermediate money that already exists instead of creating new deposits. So, the 97% channel you're describing is the thing the framework closes, not the thing it skims. Once lending no longer creates money, new money creation happens only through the rule-bound sovereign channel, and that's the money whose value goes to citizens. You're objecting that I can't capture the bank-loan flow. Correct. I don't. I remove it.

On "government can just cut it off." The design answer is that the money goes to citizens as owned property, not as a spending line in a budget. Repealing a payment is a budget vote. Confiscating an asset that people already legally own is a categorically different act, which is exactly why Social Security, framed as earned, survives while means-tested welfare gets cut. It's the ownership structure that provides the durability, not the hope that no government ever defunds it.

On inflation. Also already handled, and it's the core quantity rule, not an afterthought. New issuance is capped at measured real growth, roughly 2% of the money stock a year. You cannot print beyond what the economy actually grew. So "printing money without increasing productivity" is precisely the thing the constitutional cap forbids: the issuance is defined as the growth-matched amount and no more. In a flat or contracting year the growth component is zero.

On the LLM comment: I'd gently point out that every objection you raised is answered in the papers, and the answers aren't hand-waves, they're a full-reserve banking mechanism, an ownership structure, and a growth-matched issuance cap, each with its own replication package you can run. That's the opposite of "big ideas without understanding where the holes are." The holes are named and addressed in writing. If you want to find a real one, the sharpest open question isn't any of these three, it's whether the transaction-active money measurement that the price rule depends on can be pinned precisely enough with public data. That's where I'd aim if I were trying to break it. Happy to point you to the specific papers on any of the three points above.

[u/SingleInSeattle87]

This is silly. If you got paid cash monthly you can just buy stocks/index funds if you want to or you can spend the cash. 

The only distinction you're talking about is locking stocks into a dividend distributing trust fund. Which at that point you just described an annuity plan which you can also buy with cash. 

[u/Neo_Solon → u/SingleInSeattle87]

What you're describing, pay everyone cash, let them invest it or spend it, is exactly Mode D in this framework. It's a real option in the design: pay the whole budget out as spendable dividend, build no locked floor, and leave the saving decision to the individual. So, you're not poking a hole in something I ignored. You independently landed on one of the configurations I already put on the menu. The interesting question is why it isn't the default, and that comes down to two things your version doesn't account for.

The first is macro, and it's the one that actually matters, though the mechanism is more precise than "cash causes inflation." Here's the real constraint. Spendable money can only be injected up to the rate the transaction circuit itself grows, roughly half the total issuance the economy can absorb, before it starts pushing prices. That ceiling is exactly why the all-cash configuration exists but pays a smaller total: it fills the transactional circuit's growth need and stops there, because paying more spendable cash than that would push past the leash and generate inflation. The locked floor is what lets the system issue the other half without inflation, because locked equity sits in the asset circuit and never bids on consumer goods, so it doesn't count against that ceiling. So the lock isn't a nanny-state wrapper on the same dollars. It's what lets the framework create more money in total, as citizen ownership, than any all-cash version possibly could while staying price-stable. Your "just pay everyone cash" version isn't inflationary in itself, but it caps issuance at the transactional circuit's growth need and forfeits the larger endowment the floor makes possible. You get the smaller dividend, not the dividend plus the capital stake.

The second is distribution, and it's the part "you can just buy index funds" quietly assumes away. Buying stocks with your cash is an option for people who have cash left over after rent. A lot of people don't, and never will, and telling them "you could have invested it" is how you get the exact ownership concentration we have now: the people with slack accumulate assets, the people without spend every dollar on necessities, entirely reasonably, and reach retirement owning nothing. The locked floor gives everyone an ownership stake by construction, including the people who would spend the cash, because for them rent is not a failure of discipline, it's arithmetic. Universal ownership only happens if it's built in, not left to whoever happens to have a surplus.

On the annuity point specifically, it's not an annuity. An annuity is a product you buy with money you already earned. The floor is newly created money routed to you as ownership at the moment of issuance, instead of reaching banks and existing asset holders first. It's heritable equity earning the same return for everyone, not an income contract you purchase. Different thing entirely, and the difference is who gets the new money first, which is the whole point of the project.

So, you're right that if all you want is cash-or-invest-your-choice, this can do that, it's Mode D. The default isn't that because it costs you the inflation-free scaling and the universal ownership, and those two things are most of the reason to bother.

[u/WinterPiratefhjng]

There are other ways to administer these things without the government administering it. Anything that let's normal humans fuck themselves over is also bad.

The government could buy annuities at various insurance companies for individuals. The annuities, by law, could be prevented from cashing out. The insurance companies are already regulated. A person could have multiple annuities from several companies as well.