The Method
Every reform,
scored twice.
No reform earns a place here on a slogan. Each one carries a ten-year federal budget column and a societal-benefit column — gross and net, contingencies built in, every claim footnoted. Here is the arithmetic of a single reform, the way it appears on every page in the Library.
Corporate Extraction Surtax · Federal budget, 10-year
Net +$279.5B ROI 1.7 : 1
The question
Today, every dollar a corporation returns to shareholders is taxed the same whether it was earned by building something or by extracting it. One reform changes that. Does it pay for itself?
The cost
First, the price. Cutting the headline corporate rate from 21% to 19% costs the Treasury about $400 billion over ten years; administering the new surtax adds half a billion. Call it $400.5 billion out.
The return
Then, the revenue. A surtax on extraction — buybacks and dividends beyond what a company reinvests — raises about $680 billion over the same decade. The return is nearly 1.7× the cost.
The verdict
The reform doesn’t cost money. It makes money — a net +$279.5 billion — while tilting the whole economy back toward building over extracting. That is what “with the math” means.
Two hundred thirty-five times over.
Every proposal in the Library is worked the same way. None of it is a guess.