# The Floor

*A portable case for universal material security · October 2026 · Public domain (CC0)*

> A society rich enough to prevent destitution has no right to use destitution as leverage.

## 1. The idea

Every society wealthy enough to do it should guarantee a floor no one falls below: a home, enough food, medical care, and an education. Not as charity, but as the precondition for everything else. You cannot fully be a worker, a citizen, or a free person without it.

- **Housing.** A home of your own, not a shelter bed.
- **Food.** Enough to eat, unconditionally.
- **Medical care.** Full coverage. No bill at the point of care.
- **Education.** College, a trade or an apprenticeship.

**Universal means universal.** Everyone who lives here gets it: no means tests, no sorting the deserving from the undeserving. Universal programs like Social Security endure; programs that sort people get stigmatized and cut. Everyone pays in, too, by income, on the tax return, never at an office window.

The Floor does not abolish incentive. It abolishes desperation as an employment policy.

**Why it doesn't exist yet.** Cost and politics are part of it. Another part is that desperation does real work in our economy. When survival depends on taking any job on any terms, employers don't have to make jobs worth choosing. That gap is a hidden subsidy, paid by the people with the least and collected by everyone who buys their labor cheap. The Floor ends it. Expect opposition from those who benefit, dressed as arithmetic. Page 2 is the arithmetic.

## 2. What it costs

The Floor is not free. But for its most expensive guarantee, America already pays the bill, and pays it twice over.

**$14,885** per person on health care in 2024; Germany $9,365, France $7,367. **Medical care.** The U.S. spends 18% of GDP on health care for a life expectancy of 79. One public payer with no bills takes over $1.8 trillion a year of premiums, bills and state Medicaid budgets and cuts total spending about $200 billion, mostly overhead, a third of every health dollar.

**3.9M** homes vacant and for rent in autumn 2026, five for every person homeless. **Housing.** 745,652 people were homeless on one night in January 2025; 22.7 million renter households pay over 30% of income for housing. The Floor ends homelessness with Housing First, makes the 30% rule an entitlement, and builds 200,000 public homes a year: about $180 billion, less than the tax code hands homeowners each year. The largest new cost.

**29%** of the U.S. food supply is wasted; 47.9 million people are food insecure. **Food.** The constraint is distribution, not production. Every resident holds a Floor card loaded with USDA's Thrifty Food Plan, full below the poverty line and tapering above it, no application and no conditions, plus free school meals for every child: about $150 billion a year on top of SNAP.

**$80.7B** collected in tuition and fees by public colleges in fiscal 2025. **Education.** Public K–12 is already universal. Tuition-free public college and training replaces what public colleges now charge, about $90 billion a year with seats and apprenticeships grown. Because the Floor already pays for the room and the food, this is the cheapest pillar.

**The full bill.** Total: $2.2 trillion a year in new public spending at full operation (year eight; health in four), 7% of GDP; $1.8 trillion of it replaces premiums, bills and state Medicaid payments that end. Net new cost: close to zero. Funding: contributions that replace premiums, plus taxes on capital, wealth and tax breaks. Page 3.

## 3. Paying for it

Everyone is covered. Everyone pays in, by income. Nearly everyone comes out ahead.

**What replaces the premium** ($1.5 trillion a year; these end the $2.4 trillion households, employers and states now pay for care):

| Measure | $B a year |
| --- | --- |
| Employers: 7.5% of payroll above the first $2 million | 610 |
| Households: 4% of income above $40,000 (joint) | 575 |
| States: today's Medicaid share, continued | 335 |

**What the top pays** ($0.7 trillion a year, from capital, wealth and tax breaks; CBO's own scores where it has them):

| Measure | $B a year |
| --- | --- |
| Cap itemized deductions at 15% | 191 |
| Wealth tax: 2% above $50M, 3% above $1B | 180 |
| Corporate rate to 28% | 95 |
| A rebuilt IRS | 70 |
| Top brackets up 2 points; gains taxed at death | 111 |
| Financial transaction tax, 0.01% | 30 |

**The arithmetic closes, and not on the top 1% alone.** The two tiers raise $2.20 trillion against a bill of $2.22 trillion; a carbon fee ($92B) and a half-point on the household contribution ($70B) cover the margin. If the courts strike the wealth tax, a 5% VAT ($338B) takes its place, as in every European floor.

**The household ledger.** An $80,000 family now pays about $11,000 a year in premium share and bills; after, $1,600, plus wages from the $14,000 its employer stops paying; ahead $9,000 to $20,000 a year. A $250,000 household: contribution $8,400 in place of premiums and bills, little of the employer saving reaches it, some deductions capped; a wash. A $1,000,000 household: contribution $38,000, plus higher brackets and gains taxed at death; comes out behind. Above $50 million, the wealth tax is the bill.

Universal contribution is the same principle as universal benefit. Everyone pays in; everyone is covered; the median household gains the most.

## 4. The objections, answered

1. **"People will stop working."** Every experiment finds people work a little less and nobody stops. Finland's basic income raised employment slightly; Alaska's dividend had no effect; the 1970s U.S. trials cut men's hours about 7%. Everything above the Floor still has to be earned.
2. **"They haven't earned it."** Nobody earns the Floor. They earn everything above it. Security isn't the reward for contributing; it's what makes contributing possible, for the student, the new parent, and the worker laid off at 55.
3. **"It'll go to the wrong people."** Deciding who the wrong people are is what means tests do, and every test brings paperwork, stigma and bias; one eligible household in four gets housing help today. The Floor sorts no one at a desk. Contributions scale with income on the tax return, where everyone is already sorted.
4. **"The economy can't take it."** It already does. Premiums and tax breaks counted, America spends more on social provision than France. The Floor changes the channel, not the amount: 7% of GDP moves through the budget; the real new spending is half a percent. CBO's modeling of single payer puts GDP within a point of its path.
5. **"Won't it just push prices up?"** It could, if it were cash chasing a fixed supply. The Floor guarantees goods, starts from a 7.6% rental vacancy rate and a 29% food surplus, charters the building authority in year one, and makes the rent guarantee an entitlement only once homes are rising. Supply is the policy.
6. **"Won't it draw people from elsewhere?"** Countries with universal programs answer this with residency rules: how long, and on what terms, someone must live there to be covered. The Floor refuses sorting residents by worth. Where residency begins is a separate choice, best made in the open.
7. **"It's a trap for people just above poverty."** It would be, if three guarantees each tapered on their own: stacked, they could take 70 cents of a raise. The Floor uses one taper, run on the tax return, capping all three at about a quarter: $40 to 60 billion a year, and the difference between a floor and a trap.
8. **"The government can't run it."** Not today's. The Floor needs an authority that builds 200,000 homes a year, a payer that holds a budget against hospitals, and a tax agency that can run a taper. Vienna houses 60% of its people because Vienna builds. The money closes; the capacity must be rebuilt. That is the work.

## 5. Principle and deadline

**The principle.** The evidence supports the Floor, but the case doesn't rest on it. Even if every study came back even, a society that can guarantee security and chooses not to is making a choice, and should defend that choice in the open. The numbers here exist to end one conversation, the one that says there is no money, so the real one can begin.

**The window.** Automation and AI are reshaping work now: in the occupations most exposed to AI, employment of 22-to-25-year-olds has already fallen 13% relative to older workers. The country is moving the other way: in 2025 it cut Medicaid and food assistance, extended work requirements to 64-year-olds, and ended the survey that measures hunger. Disruption breeds anger, and anger without an outlet turns toward scapegoats: immigrants, minorities, whoever is nearest. The Floor has to be imaginable and believed possible before that pressure peaks, so that what people reach for is security rather than someone to blame.

**Build the Floor.**

### Sources, as of October 2026

Health: OECD, Health at a Glance 2025; CMS, National Health Expenditure data (2024); CDC/NCHS, life expectancy 2024; CBO single-payer papers (2020, 2022); Himmelstein and Woolhandler (2020). Housing: HUD, 2025 Homelessness Assessment Report; Census Housing Vacancy Survey, Q3 2026; Harvard JCHS 2026; Urban Institute (2023); Jacob et al., Am. J. Prev. Med. Food and education: USDA ERS, Household Food Security 2024; ReFED, 2026 Food Waste Report; USDA FNS, SNAP FY2025; SHEEO, SHEF FY2025; Georgetown CEW (2020). Work: Kela, Finland's basic income experiment (2020); Jones and Marinescu, Alaska (2022); Burtless, 1970s income experiments; Vivalt et al., OpenResearch (2024). Spending and revenue: OECD Social Expenditure Database (net total); CBO, Options for Reducing the Deficit 2025–2034; Saez and Zucman (2021); Penn Wharton (2019). AI: Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, Canaries in the Coal Mine (2025). Every figure's source page: [The Floor: Economic Package](./package.html) (also as [Markdown](./economic-package.md)).