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 up to $130,000 in original issue value. The shares pay a mandatory five-percent annual dividend. They are marketable, heritable, and transferable.
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 up to $130,000 in original issue value. 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 Capital Accumulation Tax 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.
Follow on Substack
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.