How corporate equity pledges and sovereign wealth schemes are being used to paper over the destruction of America’s public infrastructure.

Illustration depicting a glowing, fragile net of stock certificates held over crumbling public buildings. Image by Author and Gemini\u00a0(AI)

Illustration depicting a glowing, fragile net of stock certificates held over crumbling public buildings. Image by Author and Gemini (AI)

Oct. 22, 2026 — Madkat Omega

If you spent any time online in mid-October 2026, you probably felt a strange, momentary flicker of hope.

Within forty-eight hours, two of the most powerful forces in American technology offered what sounded like an astonishing olive branch to a country terrified of the future. First came Anthropic, the elite artificial intelligence lab behind Claude, announcing the creation of the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. Under this new framework, the company committed an initial five percent of its equity to the public interest, promising to release up to two percent more for every fifty percent jump in the company’s valuation. When paired with personal pledges from its founders to give away eighty percent of their holdings and an employee equity-matching initiative, Anthropic effectively pledged that one out of every five shares in the enterprise would be dedicated to the public good.

Less than a day later, Elon Musk stepped into the arena with his signature brand of digital theater. Having publicly taunted Anthropic for parking its equity in an institutional foundation rather than cutting checks directly to ordinary people, Musk took to X with an audacious vow: next year, he promised, he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every single child in the United States, calling it the first of many such distributions.

Coming just weeks after SpaceX made its long-awaited debut on Wall Street — an initial public offering that briefly crowned Musk the world’s first trillionaire before a thirty-five percent market plunge reminded everyone that rockets are volatile assets — the promise was an irresistible media sensation. Seventy-three million American kids, handed a direct stake in humanity’s journey to the stars.

Combine those headlines with OpenAI’s massive corporate restructuring, which handed its nonprofit foundation an equity stake valued on paper at one hundred and thirty billion dollars, and look at what is happening in Washington. President Donald Trump has ordered the creation of a National Sovereign Wealth Fund while rolling out government-seeded investment accounts for newborns. Across the aisle, Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced landmark legislation demanding that frontier AI monopolies surrender fifty percent of their equity directly to the American people.

Step back, and it looks like a miracle. It looks like the long-awaited dawn of Universal Basic Income. It reads like a grand, bipartisan realization that artificial intelligence is about to upend the middle class, and that the only moral path forward is to socialize the extraordinary profits of silicon and compute so future generations can inherit the earth.

We are not witnessing the dawn of Universal Basic Income or the democratic socialization of artificial intelligence. We are witnessing the construction of the Dividend Illusion — a performative, illiquid phantom safety net erected on the smoldering rubble of the American public commons.

Look past the press releases, the viral posts, and the self-congratulatory speeches, and a far uglier story reveals itself. These corporate endowments, paper stock distributions, and national investment schemes will not pay your rent, they will not lower the cost of your groceries, and they will certainly not replace the schools, medical research, and public safety nets that have been methodically dismantled right before our eyes.

What we are witnessing is an elaborate sleight of hand. The very architects of austerity who spent the past two years gutting our public institutions are now offering us company scrip, asking us to cheer for the crumbs of our own stolen commonwealth.

What Is Actually Being Promised

To make sense of this sudden corporate generosity, you have to peel back the marketing language and examine the plumbing. Despite being breathlessly lumped together under the umbrella of “AI profit-sharing,” the proposals floating between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill are fundamentally different animals, built on entirely different incentives.

Take Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund. On paper, dedicating twenty percent of an AI company’s total equity to the public good sounds revolutionary. But in practice, this is an institutional endowment model housed inside a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, not a citizen dividend. Everyday Americans will not receive stock certificates in the mail, nor will displaced workers see quarterly dividend deposits when an AI model replaces their jobs. Instead, the shares will sit inside a corporate-controlled entity where any future equity contributions above the baseline remain explicitly at the discretion of the board of directors. The money generated from those shares will be funneled into elite technocratic grantmaking: funding AI alignment studies, sponsoring academic conferences, and financing pilot software programs. It is built in the image of the Wellcome Trust or the Gates Foundation — run by handpicked trustees behind closed doors, completely removed from democratic accountability.

Anthropic was simply refining a playbook written by its fiercest rival. When OpenAI completed its high-stakes corporate conversion into a for-profit benefit corporation valued at half a trillion dollars, it quieted public backlash by granting its nonprofit arm a twenty-six percent stake worth one hundred and thirty billion dollars.

For years, OpenAI chief Sam Altman has preached the gospel of equity-backed welfare. In his influential manifesto, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” Altman argued that as artificial intelligence drives the value of human labor toward zero, the state must stop relying on income taxes and instead build an American Equity Fund. His blueprint called for taxing giant companies two and a half percent of their market value every year in stock, distributing the equity and cash dividends directly to every adult citizen. Yet when OpenAI finally altered its corporate charter, it created no such public pipeline. It created a private foundation insulated from voters, governed by corporate insiders, and dogged by legal watchdogs who warned that the structure offered virtually no enforceable accountability to the public.

Then you have Elon Musk’s populist counter-punch: handing a single share of newly public SpaceX to every minor in America. There are roughly seventy-three million children in this country. Gifting each of them a share represents an eye-popping financial commitment running into billions of dollars.

Yet a post on social media is a far cry from a functioning transfer of assets. Legally and operationally, handing equity to tens of millions of minors is a bureaucratic quagmire. Under existing federal and state statutes, children cannot directly own stock; their assets must be held in custodial accounts governed by Uniform Transfers to Minors acts. Opening those accounts requires Social Security verifications, complex identity checks, and private brokerage accounts for every single household. Without a massive, taxpayer-funded federal registry linked directly to Wall Street clearinghouses, millions of low-income, unbanked, and rural families would find it nearly impossible to claim their child’s share.

Meanwhile, Washington is running its own parallel experiments. Donald Trump launched the idea of an American Sovereign Wealth Fund through Executive Order 14196, envisioning a state-directed investment vehicle financed by tariffs and natural resource extraction to fund megaprojects and pay down national debt. Alongside this, his administration championed Trump Accounts, a program offering a one-thousand-dollar Treasury seed deposit into stock market accounts for babies born between 2025 and 2028.

At the other political pole sits Bernie Sanders with the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. Rather than relying on voluntary corporate pledges, Sanders’ bill is an aggressive attempt at mandatory socialization: it would slap a one-time fifty percent equity excise tax on every frontier AI company pulling in two hundred million dollars or more in annual revenue, force conglomerates like Google and Microsoft to structurally separate their AI divisions within ninety days, and put that fifty percent stake into a seven-trillion-dollar federal fund governed by an independent commission tasked with paying out roughly one thousand dollars per year in direct dividends to every citizen.

Silicon Valley’s sudden rush toward voluntary benefit funds and one-share giveaways is not spontaneous altruism. It is an insurance policy. Tech billionaires see mandatory fifty-percent equity taxes gaining populist traction, and they are offering five percent today so they don’t lose half their companies tomorrow.

When you view these moves together, the real strategy comes into sharp focus. Tech leaders can read the political tea leaves. They see mass anxiety brewing over automated layoffs and stagnant wages. By voluntarily placing five percent of their equity into a friendly foundation or tossing a single share to American kids, they construct an impenetrable public-relations shield. They get to claim they are sharing the future with everyday citizens — all while preserving absolute operational control over their boardrooms and keeping ninety-five percent of the upside firmly in private hands.

The Arsonist’s Philanthropy

To truly understand why these promises taste like ash, you have to look at what happened immediately before they were made.

It takes an extraordinary kind of cynicism for Elon Musk to position himself as the benevolent benefactor of America’s children, and for Donald Trump to tout one-thousand-dollar baby investment accounts as the ultimate pro-family policy, when both men spent the preceding two years leading an unprecedented wrecking-ball campaign against the American civil service and the social safety net.

Under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk was appointed by Trump to carry out an aggressive purge of the federal budget. Musk took the stage and promised to slash two trillion dollars in federal waste. When the smoke finally cleared, even DOGE’s internal ledgers claimed only a fraction of that figure, hovering around two hundred and fifteen billion dollars in cancellations and terminations. Independent budget watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office and conservative analysts at the libertarian Cato Institute quickly pointed out that DOGE’s official figures were riddled with basic arithmetic errors, phantom lease savings, and mounting legal liabilities, concluding that it was impossible to prove the initiative had saved the taxpayer a single net dime.

What DOGE did manage to do, however, was dismantle the daily machinery of the American commonwealth. More than a quarter of a million dedicated civil servants were purged from their posts through forced retirements, mass resignations, and hiring freezes. At least twenty-three high-ranking DOGE operatives executed workforce massacres inside the exact federal agencies that had spent years regulating the private industries where those operatives previously worked.

The human toll was immediate, devastating, and entirely concentrated on the public systems that working-class families depend on to survive.

Consider the National Science Foundation, the premier institution responsible for funding fundamental American scientific inquiry and educating future generations of engineers and researchers. After Congress appropriated eight and three-quarter billion dollars for the agency, DOGE personnel moved into the building and unilaterally terminated over seventeen hundred active research grants worth roughly one point four billion dollars.

They did not target wasteful administrative bloat. The single hardest-hit division was the STEM Education Directorate, which saw eight hundred and thirty-nine active grants wiped out — totaling nearly nine hundred million dollars in lost funding. In one fell swoop, nearly an entire year’s worth of federal STEM education financing vanished. Scholarships for first-generation engineering students disappeared mid-semester. Longitudinal research tracking student retention rates in high-poverty school districts was abruptly canceled. By mid-2026, the National Science Foundation was forced to slash the budgets of hundreds of basic science programs by twenty to thirty percent, dismantling specialized research divisions across the country.

Next came the deliberate destruction of public media. For nearly six decades, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ensured that every household in America — no matter how poor, how rural, or how isolated — had free, universal access to high-quality early childhood programming, science education, and trusted local emergency news through PBS and NPR. Under the Rescissions Act of 2025, pushed through Congress and signed by Trump, more than a billion dollars in pre-approved funding was clawed back.

Within two weeks of the rescission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that after fifty-eight years of service, it was shuttering its operations for good. Local stations in rural areas across the country were forced to turn off their transmitters or plead for private donations simply to keep their broadcast towers powered. A federal judge would later rule that an accompanying executive order aimed at stripping funding from NPR and PBS was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, designed specifically to punish independent reporting. But by then, the institutional architecture had already been torn down.

At the Social Security Administration, DOGE operatives eliminated eight thousand staff positions, causing catastrophic processing backlogs for disability benefits and retirement claims just as baby boomers were retiring in record numbers. Behind the scenes, unelected tech advisors gained access to Treasury and Social Security payment infrastructure, prompting formal whistleblower complaints and Department of Justice investigations into the illegal migration of sensitive citizen records onto private servers.

Abroad, the near-total dismantling of USAID left international humanitarian and medical networks in chaos, with journalists documenting cases where vaccine and food supply lines collapsed overnight, abandoning children in crisis zones.

Handing an American child a single, volatile share of SpaceX after gutting nine hundred million dollars in STEM education, shuttering public television, and firing eight thousand Social Security workers is not generosity. It is an arsonist offering a commemorative matchbook in front of a burned-down schoolhouse.

This is the dark paradox of modern American leadership. Trump bragged about these cuts at rallies, framing the systematic destruction of public goods as a heroic victory for taxpayers. Yet today, facing widespread anxiety over disappearing jobs and an economy increasingly out of reach for regular people, Musk and Trump want working-class families to celebrate a locked, speculative share of stock and a token bank account. Having stripped the floorboards from the house, they are handing us back a single splinter and demanding our gratitude.

Why Private Endowments Cannot Save Us

There is an understandable impulse among well-meaning people to grasp at any lifeline. You might look at Anthropic’s billions in pledged shares or OpenAI’s foundation and think: Sure, the politics are messy, but shouldn’t we celebrate that billions in private tech wealth might be funneled into education, healthcare, and child welfare when government has failed us?

It is a comforting thought, but it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how public institutions work and why private philanthropy is mathematically and structurally incapable of replacing them.

First, there is the sheer, unbridgeable gulf in scale and statutory permanence. When people hear figures like ten billion or one hundred billion dollars in corporate press releases, it sounds like boundless wealth. Measured against the operating requirements of a nation of 340 million people, it is pocket change. Total annual public spending on elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States exceeds one trillion dollars every single year. A single federal baseline — the National School Lunch Program — spends over twenty-eight billion dollars annually to feed thirty million children every weekday, while Title I appropriations deliver more than eighteen billion dollars in formula-driven grants to sustain classroom staffing across thirteen thousand high-poverty school districts.

Against this backdrop, the math of private endowments quickly collapses. Under standard foundation practice and federal distribution rules, an endowment disburses roughly five percent of its assets each year to preserve its principal against inflation. Even an unprecedented fifty-billion-dollar tech foundation would generate only about two and a half billion dollars a year in usable distributions — less than a quarter of one percent of America’s public education budget. To put that in perspective, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private philanthropic vehicle on Earth, disburses roughly seven to eight billion dollars annually across the entire globe — barely a third of what the state of California alone spends to operate its public university systems in a single fiscal year. Crucially, public funding represents an enforceable legal obligation that cannot simply sunset when an asset depreciates; private grantmaking is a temporary gift that can be pulled at the first sign of a bear market.

Second, venture-backed philanthropy has an allergic reaction to mundane operating budgets. Tax dollars are indispensable precisely because they pay for the unglamorous, recurring friction of daily civilization: replacing corroded municipal water mains, paying certified special-education aides a living wage, keeping rural maternity wards open, and funding the diesel fuel for school bus fleets. Tech billionaires do not want to subsidize municipal payrolls or boiler repairs. Conditioned by venture capital, they chase novelty, proprietary intellectual property, and high-profile “disruptions” that all too often double as captive marketing channels for their own commercial products.

We have seen this movie play out with disastrous clarity. When Mark Zuckerberg directed one hundred million dollars to reform the Newark public school system in 2010, the windfall did not stabilize the district’s aging physical infrastructure or hire long-term reading specialists. Instead, more than twenty million dollars was immediately swallowed by elite management consultants billing upwards of one thousand dollars a day, while millions more vanished into contentious legal battles and privately managed charter expansions. Once the grant cycle expired, the underlying district deficits returned, leaving the classroom environment just as precarious as before. When Silicon Valley executives announce that their equity will transform public education today, they are not volunteering to patch leaking school roofs or hire cafeteria workers; they are funding pilot software initiatives to place their proprietary AI tutors in front of student eyes, locking public school districts into their commercial ecosystems.

Third, private endowments obliterate democratic governance. When public services are funded through tax revenues, priorities are debated in the open. Budgets are contested on the floor of Congress, school board meetings are subject to public comment, and agency administrators can be subpoenaed to testify under oath. If an agency mismanages funds or abandons a vital public mandate, voters hold the ultimate power to clean house at the ballot box.

With a private benefit fund, that democratic architecture is entirely erased, replaced by the unaccountable sovereignty of closed boardrooms. We learned just how fragile private corporate governance truly is in November 2023, when four unelected board members at OpenAI threw a multi-billion-dollar global enterprise into chaos over a single weekend with zero transparency or public input. Anthropic’s own public benefit framework explicitly notes that any equity contributions beyond the initial five percent baseline remain subject to the sole discretion of its corporate directors. If an AI foundation’s board decides five years from now that “the public benefit” is best served by bankrolling esoteric academic papers on synthetic consciousness rather than funding lead abatement in the industrial Midwest or maternal health clinics in rural Appalachia, everyday citizens have no legal standing, no vote, and no avenue of appeal.

Finally, there is the tax-shelter paradox. When tech founders and corporations donate billions in appreciated equity to private foundations or public benefit entities, they are not making a purely selfless sacrifice — they are executing one of the most lucrative tax-avoidance strategies permitted under the Internal Revenue Code. Transferring zero-basis founder shares allows executives to completely sidestep federal and state capital gains taxes on enormous paper windfalls, while generating massive charitable deductions that offset their ordinary income.

The immediate casualty of this philanthropy is the public balance sheet. For every billion dollars in appreciated stock sheltered inside a private tech foundation, the United States Treasury forfeits hundreds of millions of dollars in cold, hard tax revenue. That is money that would have flowed directly into the Highway Trust Fund, Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, and municipal transit systems. Private tech philanthropy does not supplement the commonwealth; it cannibalizes it, allowing billionaires to privatize the power to set social priorities while sticking ordinary wage earners — whose taxes are deducted straight from their paychecks — with the bill for maintaining society.

Breaking Down the Kitchen-Table Reality

What does all of this look like when it reaches the living room of an average working family?

Imagine a middle-class household with two children, trying to stay afloat in an economy where health insurance premiums keep climbing, infant daycare costs fifteen hundred dollars a month, and the parents go to sleep wondering if an AI automation tool will make their white-collar office jobs obsolete before their oldest child graduates from high school.

When you strip away the lofty media spin, the practical value of these proposals to that family collapses into stark realities:

Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund and OpenAI’s massive foundation stake will deliver exactly zero dollars in household income. Not a single cent will land in that family’s checking account to help cover this month’s rent or pay for emergency dental work. The money is locked away inside institutional trusts to finance third-party studies, nonprofit grants, and technical alignment research.

Elon Musk’s promised SpaceX share offers no immediate relief either. Even setting aside the staggering administrative hurdles of transferring equity to seventy-three million minors, a single share of SpaceX is an illiquid, volatile paper asset. SpaceX stock shed over thirty-five percent of its peak market value within days of its public debut, underscoring how volatile frontier commercial equities really are. More importantly, under custodial laws, that share must sit in a locked account until the child turns eighteen or twenty-one. A locked share of rocket equity cannot buy winter coats today, cannot pay for speech therapy this afternoon, and cannot replace the community programs wiped out by federal budget cuts.

Trump Accounts present an equally regressive math problem. On the surface, receiving a one-thousand-dollar government seed deposit for a newborn sounds like a helpful start. The promotional materials for the program feature flashy investment calculators showing how that account could theoretically compound into seven hundred and forty-two thousand dollars by the time the child retires.

Look closely at the mechanics, though, and the illusion shatters. Reaching that seven-hundred-thousand-dollar figure requires parents to deposit the maximum contribution of five thousand dollars in cold, hard cash every single year for decades. If a struggling family living paycheck to paycheck cannot afford to add any money and relies solely on the initial one-thousand-dollar government contribution, the program’s own projections estimate that the account will grow to roughly fifteen thousand dollars after decades of inflation — an amount that will barely cover a few months of living expenses by the time that infant reaches adulthood.

In practice, high-cap custodial investment accounts operate as a taxpayer-funded windfall for the wealthy. Families who already have five thousand dollars in spare disposable income per child every year receive an extraordinary new tax-advantaged shelter, while working-class families receive a one-thousand-dollar token that is locked away for eighteen years, offering zero support for the immediate costs of raising a child.

Even Bernie Sanders’ ambitious proposal to create a seven-trillion-dollar sovereign fund by seizing fifty percent of corporate AI equity runs into profound operational bottlenecks. Unlike the corporate pledges, Sanders’ bill genuinely aims to deliver universal cash dividends of roughly one thousand dollars per year to every American citizen. But equity valuation is fundamentally different from cash flow.

Frontier AI companies are currently burning astronomical piles of capital. They are pouring tens of billions of dollars every quarter into specialized silicon, gigawatt-scale electrical hookups, and massive data-center construction. They do not generate hundreds of billions in surplus cash profits. If a sovereign wealth fund held seven trillion dollars in AI equity and was required by law to distribute three hundred and fifty billion dollars in cash dividends every year, the fund would have to dump hundreds of billions of dollars in tech shares onto the open market every single year just to raise the cash — a fire sale that would steadily crush the very valuations the fund depends upon to survive.

The Hostage Economy

There is a final, critical distinction that every citizen needs to understand: none of these schemes represent Universal Basic Income.

True Universal Basic Income is simple, direct, and unconditional: liquid purchasing power transferred to every citizen, creating a foundational floor beneath which no American can drop. In the popular imagination, the phrase often triggers an immediate reflex: America is not a socialist country, and giving people cash simply subsidizes idleness.

But that objection misunderstands both the history of the idea and the mechanics of traditional welfare. Bureaucratic socialism dictates what people may consume through rationed vouchers and government-administered programs. Unconditional cash is fundamentally pro-market — which is why Nobel laureate Milton Friedman advocated for a negative income tax, arguing that giving individuals cash preserves consumer sovereignty and eliminates bloated government bureaucracies. More importantly, an unconditional floor actively dismantles the “welfare trap.” Under our current patchwork safety net, low-income workers are punished for striving because earning a modest raise can abruptly trigger the loss of Medicaid, food assistance, or housing credits. A universal baseline can never be snatched away, ensuring every dollar earned in the private market is purely additive.

We already have empirical proof of how this works in practice. When the expanded Child Tax Credit sent parents monthly checks of two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars per child in 2021, child poverty was cut nearly in half almost overnight. The doomsday predictions of mass labor dropouts never materialized; study after study revealed that families used the money to afford daycare, repair commuter vehicles, and absorb grocery inflation, enabling parents to stay employed during a period of massive economic volatility. That is not the construction of a permanent welfare class — it is the baseline capital required to survive, adapt, and compete in an economy on the brink of technological upheaval.

Equity dividends and sovereign wealth funds are the polar opposite of a true safety net. A genuine safety net is counter-cyclical: it is designed to catch you when the market crashes, when the economy enters a recession, and when private companies are laying off workers by the thousands.

Stock dividends, by contrast, are intensely pro-cyclical. When an economic shock hits or a speculative tech bubble pops, equity values plummet. If your family’s basic survival is tied to the stock performance of artificial intelligence conglomerates or private space ventures, your financial safety net will evaporate at the precise moment you lose your job and need help the most.

Worse still, equity-based welfare creates a dangerous dynamic that should alarm anyone concerned about corporate power: it turns the entire American population into political hostages for corporate stock prices.

If every child’s future education and every family’s dividend check is tied to the market capitalization of AI monopolies, then holding those monopolies accountable becomes politically impossible. It is not the democratic socialization of Silicon Valley; it is the financial capture of the American public.

Consider what happens if tens of millions of American households become reliant on the valuation of a handful of frontier tech giants. The moment the Department of Justice tries to enforce antitrust laws to break up an AI monopoly, or Congress tries to mandate strict labor protections against algorithmic worker displacement, or the Environmental Protection Agency moves to curb the staggering water and energy consumption of data centers, the tech giants will issue a simple warning: If you regulate us, our share price will plummet, and your child’s college fund will be wiped out.

By transforming citizens into micro-shareholders, Silicon Valley effectively recruits the entire public into its lobbying arm, ensuring that corporate profits will always take precedence over the public good.

Reclaiming the Public Commons

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial barons who ran coal towns and textile mills perfected the art of company paternalism. They built company-funded libraries, sponsored community baseball teams, and handed out holiday turkeys to their employees. They did this because it bought social peace, generated glowing headlines, and distracted the public from the reality that they paid poverty wages, crushed organized labor, and paid virtually nothing in municipal taxes to build public water systems or properly fund local schools.

America is rapidly sliding toward a digital version of the company town, wrapped in the sleek aesthetics of smartphone trading apps and Delaware benefit corporations.

When you look at Anthropic’s Public Benefit Fund, OpenAI’s foundation restructuring, Elon Musk’s promise of a SpaceX share for every child, and Washington’s flirtations with sovereign wealth funds, do not view them as the benevolent arrival of a post-labor utopia. View them as a flashing red warning light.

The people building the automated economy know how disruptive this technology is going to be. They know that generative AI and advanced automation threaten to break the historical contract that tied corporate productivity to working-class wages. And they know that if everyday Americans realize how badly their public institutions have been gutted by ideological austerity — from the nine hundred million dollars in STEM education grants wiped out at the National Science Foundation, to the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to the administrative paralysis engineered inside Social Security — the democratic backlash will be swift, fierce, and systemic.

So they offer us equity crumbs, and they ask us to call it freedom.

A society that surrenders its public institutions in exchange for corporate charity will inevitably end up with neither. If the extraordinary wealth produced by artificial intelligence belongs to the public, it is because that technology was trained on the collective knowledge, language, art, and labor of billions of human beings, powered by public electrical grids, cooled by public water, and built on scientific foundations originally funded by the American taxpayer.

We do not have to beg for a share of our own inheritance. Real economic security in the age of artificial intelligence requires solutions that cannot be wiped away by a corporate board vote or reversed by a presidential tweet:

First, we need unconditional, direct economic security — beginning with a permanent, fully refundable monthly Child Tax Credit paid in cash, providing immediate liquidity to every working parent in the country.

Second, we need to reform the tax code to directly capture corporate profits, compute infrastructure, and extreme capital accumulation in real dollars, closing the charitable foundation loopholes that allow billionaires to turn untaxed fortunes into unaccountable private fiefdoms.

Finally, we must rebuild the public commons that were so carelessly sacrificed. That means restoring the scientific integrity and educational funding of the National Science Foundation, revitalizing our civil service, investing in universal public education and childcare, and guaranteeing that free, independent, noncommercial public media exists in every zip code in America.

Do not allow the very people who took an axe to our public institutions to buy off your children’s future with a single share of stock. A share of SpaceX might let a kid watch a billionaire launch another rocket into orbit. Only a robust, well-funded, democratically governed public commonwealth can ensure that child has a real future down here on Earth.

Works Cited & Further Reading