U-Shares is a market-based architecture for universal capital ownership. Congress authorizes a new class of corporate stock that public companies may issue voluntarily, under a tax-deduction mechanism that has operated in U.S. law since 1960. Every U.S. permanent resident may hold U-Shares. Holdings are not capped; subsidized placements to low-income recipients run until an account reaches $130,000 (inflation-indexed). The shares pay a mandatory five-percent annual dividend. They are marketable, heritable, and transferable.
White Paper updated September 2, 2026. This link always serves the current version.
Innovative policy infrastructure. No candidate, no campaign, no product. Licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.
Three problems have converged. Each one resists the tools that worked in the twentieth century. Together they require an architectural response, not another redistribution program.
Problem 1
A universal basic income of $12,000 per year to every American adult costs roughly $3.12 trillion annually — more than total federal income tax revenue. OECD studies have found no fiscally sustainable universal-transfer scenario.
Problem 2
As automation captures a growing share of economic output, returns flow to capital owners rather than workers. The labor share of U.S. national income has fallen from 65% in 1980 to under 60% today.
Problem 3
The median Black family holds $24,100 in wealth. The median white family holds $188,200. This gap emerged from differential access to capital. Income transfers sustain consumption. Capital builds wealth.
The full framework is set out in eleven provisions that form a single coherent architecture. No provision stands alone.
Congress authorizes Class U-Shares. Public corporations may issue them voluntarily, up to twenty percent of paid-in capital. The shares are registered for public-market trading. They are real, marketable, heritable, transferable property.
U-Shares pay a five-percent annual dividend on original issue price, inflation-indexed. The dividend is tax-deductible using the same mechanism REITs have operated under since 1960. Net cost to the issuer: 3.95% of issued value per year — a bar most profitable companies already clear.
Every U.S. permanent resident, including minors, may hold U-Shares. Holdings are not capped; subsidized placements to low-income recipients run until an account reaches $130,000 (inflation-indexed). Three provisions direct the net subsidy toward low-income Americans: a graduated AGI exclusion, a federal tax-credit stack for poverty-level distributions, and a Dividend Exclusion Phaseout and Recapture on higher earners.
Tax benefits are transferable under the identical architecture that helped build America's clean-energy industries through the investment tax credit. Gross Treasury cost at full scale: roughly $52 billion annually — about 5% of existing means-tested spending. Modeled offsets make the net fiscal position positive.
Accounts permit hardship withdrawals, borrowing against the account for a home or education, and conversion into business equity. This is not a transfer payment spent the day it arrives. It is income this month, a house in five years, a business in ten, an inheritance in forty.
A proposal that cannot articulate its own failure modes is not serious. U-Shares has been through an internal adversarial review, an external two-reviewer design pass, and a five-persona adversarial panel — three claims sit at contested precisely because that scrutiny worked.
Fourteen claims carry the argument, each checked against outside sources on purpose. “Contested” means a credible challenge has been raised and the register parks it there rather than defending it away — that is the design working, not a blemish. Current as of the v1.0.0 tagged release; the register is live and will move as open questions resolve. See the live claims register →
Every claim in the public register ships with the specific test that would disconfirm it — the failure conditions are published, versioned, and open to challenge. A comprehensive adversarial failure audit (April 2026) seeded the register; see the live claims register → for the current, maintained version.
Every claim behind U-Shares, the formulas that produce them, and the code that runs them are published on GitHub — not a PDF appendix, but a working repository anyone can run, challenge, or extend.
Call for Papers: Falsify or Extend U-Shares
We are not asking anyone to agree. We are asking economists, tax and public-finance scholars, and governance researchers to test the work — and telling them, claim by claim, exactly what evidence would move it.
The repository holds the claims register, the load-bearing formulas, the model code behind every result, and the open research questions — twenty-six of them, organized by the kind of skeptic each one answers (mechanism design, fiscal, political economy, household finance, adjacent policy). Browse the repository → Tagged release v1.0.0 — cite the tagged version you examined, not just the repository, so critique targets a fixed point, not a moving one.
Research notes, responses to critiques, and updates on the U-Shares framework.
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New posts on the fiscal case, the REIT precedent, state-level pathways, and open research questions.
Academic economists, constitutional lawyers, and corporate finance scholars. We welcome adversarial engagement — the framework improves when smart critics find its weaknesses.
State legislators, B-Corp leaders, and corporations willing to run a voluntary two-year pilot under existing law. No federal legislation required.
Foundations, philanthropists, and family offices. Priority research tasks are scoped at $50,000 to $100,000 total.
Writers, organizers, and policy communicators. All materials are licensed Creative Commons BY-SA. Use them freely.
The U-Shares Idea is a small, individually-run research initiative. Its mission is to develop durable, intellectually honest policy infrastructure on topics where ordinary think-tank and university research programs have structural reasons to hesitate — topics that cross conventional disciplinary lines, that demand a long horizon, or that require adversarial self-scrutiny of the researcher's own work.
U-Shares is this initiative's first major public output. The framework has passed through five structured analytical sessions, three drift-remediation audits, and one published failure memo. The validation record is public in full.
What we are not: a political campaign, a financial-product seller, a lobbying organization, or a large institution. We endorse no candidate, no party, no faction. No one on this site is selling you anything.