I have sat across the table from boards of directors who would not approve a capital project without seeing the full financing plan: sources, uses, phasing, and a sensitivity analysis for when things go wrong. Nobody asks that question of federal policy proposals, and it shows. So before I asked anyone to take 8 HARPS seriously, I made sure it could survive that same scrutiny.
The Bottom Line
Under the current model, the ten dedicated revenue streams described in Chapter 20 raise an estimated $11.2 trillion a year in new federal revenue against $7.6 trillion a year in new program costs, turning today's deficit into a projected surplus. That surplus is not a rounding error or an aspirational stretch goal. It is the number that lets the Federal Debt and the Federal Budget Amendment mandate an actual, enforceable path to paying down the national debt within a generation, rather than merely promising to try.
Where the Money Comes From
The revenue side is not one big tax increase. It is ten separate, individually modest revenue streams: a modernized national consumption tax, a minimum progressive income tax rate floor, an employer healthcare contribution extended to gig and contract workers, a national land value tax, equal taxation of capital gains and carried interest, taxation of investment gains at death, a decennial mark to market provision for billionaire wealth, a phase-down of agricultural and fossil-fuel subsidies, a carbon fee, and an automation transition contribution. No single stream carries the whole plan, which is the same design principle I would apply to any revenue model I did not want to be one bad year away from collapsing.
Where the Money Goes
The cost side is dominated by the Office of Humanity: universal healthcare including drugs, dental, and vision; the universal basic income paid to every American; and education funding from early childhood through professional certification. Its gross program cost runs to roughly $11.2 trillion a year, but crediting the nine existing federal programs it absorbs and an estimated $1.1 trillion a year in healthcare cost-control savings brings the realistic net new federal commitment to roughly $6.4 trillion a year. Every other new office in the book, by comparison, adds only tens of billions of dollars a year.
The Discipline Behind the Number
A revenue plan on paper is not the same as a government that stays within it. The Federal Debt and the Federal Budget Amendment caps the structural deficit at 2.5 percent of GDP, phased in from today's 5.8 percent over five years, requires zero-based review of every federal program on a five-year cycle, sunsets federal tax expenditures on the same cycle, and replaces debt-ceiling brinkmanship with automatic borrowing authority tied to appropriations Congress has already enacted, checked by a citizen referendum backstop rather than a threat to default.
What I Am Not Claiming
I am not claiming this model is beyond debate. Every assumption, every rate, every population figure behind these numbers is disclosed, not buried, specifically so that someone with domain expertise in a given area, healthcare economics, land valuation, tax policy, can pressure test the piece they know best. These are order-of-magnitude estimates built the way Congress itself scores comparable proposals, not a precise federal score, which only the Congressional Budget Office can ultimately produce once implementing legislation exists. I would rather have a critic find a real error in one line item than have the whole model dismissed as an unexamined guess, because it is not one.
The full narrative on the fiscal model lives in Chapter 20 of the book, and a plain-language breakdown of what it all means for an individual household is on the Financing 8 HARPS page.