No arm of government should take more than a tenth.

The engine

• Abolishes the federal income, corporate, payroll, capital gains, and estate taxes. Workers keep 100% of federal withholding.
• Replaces them with a single annual levy capped at 10%, reduced by marriage and children, with a floor that cannot be legislated away.
• Restricts the federal government to that one tax. A rate ceiling means nothing if a second tax can be invented beside it, which is how the present code grew.
• Devolves all welfare (Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP) to the states, which choose whether to fund anything at all. Non-negotiable: the plan does not balance without it.
• No eligible retiree's Social Security check is cut. Everyone 62 or older at enactment keeps the full promised benefit in nominal terms. Those 55 to 61 receive buyout value and private accounts in place of a lifetime guarantee.
• Every current beneficiary re-registers with proof of citizenship within 180 days, with payments continuing while the window is open. This is the retiree's side of the bargain: the country guarantees his check will not be cut, and he proves he is the citizen it was promised to, so that every dollar owed through the transition reaches an American rather than a fraudster. Nobody currently knows how many noncitizens collect: SSA publishes no breakdown, and the Congressional Research Service offers no estimate. Re-registration produces the number and catches deceased payees, unreported marriages, identity fraud, and fraudulent dependents, against $72B in improper payments from FY2015 to FY2022. Lawfully present noncitizens who paid in receive a refund of their contributions rather than a lifetime annuity. The recovery is single-digit billions a year; the point is integrity and a verified baseline.
• Mirrors the structure at state level, capped at 10%. States drop income tax, keep property and sales. Maximum owed to all government: 20% of income — a ceiling for residents of mirroring states, since nothing compels a state to adopt the levy. What is guaranteed nationwide is the federal half.
• Exempts retirement accounts entirely (one $20,000 annual cap, no Roth/traditional distinction), inheritance below the $500M dynasty line (every family farm and family business passes untaxed; only dynasties pay), and the primary residence below $1B.
• Everyone under U.S. jurisdiction pays, citizen or not. Lawful permanent residents, visa holders, and foreign nationals with U.S.-source income are all in the base. Citizenship determines what a person receives, not what he owes — paying in is a condition of presence, drawing out is a condition of membership.
• Trusts, partnerships, and foundations are attributed to whoever controls or benefits from them. Irrevocable structures are not an exit, multi-layer and offshore chains collapse to the natural person at the end, and a foundation the filer controls is his rather than a donee.
• Eliminates non-core departments — Education, HUD, EPA, foreign aid, Commerce, Labor, Energy, and Agriculture outside its food security functions. Defense, debt service, currency, infrastructure, the VA, and a ~10% IRS remain.
• Net worth is measured monthly and averaged, not snapshotted on a single date, so assets cannot be moved offshore around the measurement and back afterward.
• Territories and tribal nations keep their existing arrangements. They do not pay the levy and do not receive the dividend; either may elect into both by compact, reversible and never imposed.
• Nuclear fission and fusion are retained and expanded as national security functions, protected from the flat-spending regime alongside defense. Compact reactors and fuel-cycle sovereignty are industrial-base and strategic assets, not discretionary research.
• Work-visa annual fee: $100,000 per foreign worker, per year, on H-1B and every equivalent employers use in its place: H-1B1, E-3, L-1, O-1, TN, and OPT/STEM OPT. A fee on H-1B alone just sends employers to the next form; close every door, or the one left open becomes the main entrance. H-2A farm labor is excluded to protect the food supply, and physicians get a ten-year moratorium.
• Expatriation: exit levy on bad-faith renunciation. Renouncing citizenship to escape the tithe triggers a mark-to-market levy at exit, a ten-year look-back on recent sales, and denial of treaty benefits for any expatriate who leaves with the levy unpaid; in Phase 2, 50% and permanent ineligibility for anything the United States offers. The 10% ceiling is the price of membership, not a universal rate limit.

Family formation

• Marriage and children bring a household to the floor. Marriage is −5 points, each child up to four another −1, landing a family at the tiered floor of 5% during the Social Security transition and 2.5% after. The floor is a hard minimum — no combination of deductions, buy-down, or charitable giving goes beneath it. A family is not exempted from the tithe; it is brought to the least of it. These deductions are available to every citizen without regard to how long his family has been here.
• Only two things reach 0%. One hundred percent disabled veterans, who were irreparably harmed in the nation's service and have already paid in a currency the Treasury cannot return; and true farmers, whose primary livelihood is the land, because a nation that cannot feed itself is not sovereign regardless of its ledgers. Nothing else reaches zero, by design.
• $50,000 in mortgage principal forgiven per child, plus a $15,000 first-child bonus. Package cost ≈$111B/yr.
• Charitable giving earns a rate point at 0.05% of net worth, scaled so a flat dollar figure cannot buy a reduction. No self-dealing to a controlled foundation.

Food security

• Agriculture is not abolished. Its food security functions stay federal, protected alongside defense and fission: animal and plant disease control (APHIS), meat inspection (FSIS), export certification, agricultural statistics (NASS), and crop insurance reinsurance. Nutrition, conservation, and rural development devolve. About $12B/yr.
• Farmer self-insurance accounts. Exempt from the levy and separate from the $20,000 retirement cap, capped at a multiple of the farm's annual operating costs. A full account lets a farmer opt out of federal crop insurance, and lenders must accept it in place of insurance for operating loans. A bridge program covers the first five to ten years and phases out automatically. Canada has run a similar program since 2008.
• Retaliation buffer. 5% of tariff revenue, about $28B/yr, is earmarked for producers hit by retaliatory tariffs, so the tariffs fund their own fallout. The buffer is capped, with overflow going to debt principal. It is diverted from the general fund, which the arithmetic below reflects.
• Food-supply emergency, a bounded tier. It is triggered by a measured fall in national staple production below its five-year average, not by a declaration. It draws only on the retaliation buffer, can never reactivate the Nickel Transactional Surcharge or breach the spending rules, and is audit-certified and jury-terminable. The existential standard is unchanged.

Elections

• A Central Political Pot funds every federal campaign equally. Anyone may contribute, including single filers and Super PACs, and contributing reduces the contributor's levy rate.
• No one may fund a candidate. Direct contributions to candidates, campaigns, parties and party committees are prohibited outright — a Phase 2 provision, since Buckley v. Valeo means no statute can ban them. Money may fund elections but cannot be aimed.
• Every private political donation forfeits all deductions and all buy-down access for ten years, forcing the full 10% levy. This covers Super PACs, direct candidate gifts, campaigns, parties, and any other vehicle. The breadth matters because of the phasing: the outright ban needs the amendment, so in Phase 1 the tax consequence has to reach every channel, or a donor simply writes the check to the candidate instead and pays nothing. This applies identically to married and single filers. A married household loses its marriage and per-child deductions; a single filer loses the Civic Buy-Down, which is his route to the floor. Neither can buy back down during the forfeiture period.
• Projected effect. The penalty is designed to exceed what a donation buys. Worked at the 5% transition floor:

  Filer	Normal	Forfeited	Per year	Over 10 yrs
  Married, 3 children ($55k gain)	5%	10%	$2,750	$27,500
  Married, no children ($42k gain)	5%	10%	$2,100	$21,000
  Single, bought down ($21k gain)	5%	10%	$1,050	$10,500
  Single, never bought down	10%	10%	$0	$0

  The last row is not a gap in the deterrent. A filer already paying the full 10% by choice has nothing to forfeit because he was never reducing his bill to begin with, and no penalty reaches a man who was not responding to the incentive in the first place. He also gains nothing: the Pot funds every qualified candidate identically, so a private donation buys no influence a public one would not. Paying more than your neighbors for a contribution that moves nothing is not a trade a rational man makes. For everyone else the arithmetic is straightforward — a household would have to value a private donation above five figures over the following decade, while the Pot accepts the same money at no cost at all. And once the amendment is ratified, giving directly to a candidate is not merely expensive but illegal.
• Failing to disclose a Super PAC donation is fraud, charged on the same footing as levy evasion and election fraud: 3–10× restitution, forfeiture, permanent disqualification from the buy-down, and prison for willful cases. Super PACs report contributions received and the two records are cross-matched, so concealment requires both parties to falsify in coordination.
• A Super PAC that falsifies its records is dissolved and its assets applied to debt principal, with no reconstitution under a new name. Its officers during the fraud are personally liable for tax evasion, not a campaign-finance violation — the falsified record is what lets a donor keep deductions he is not entitled to, which makes the organization a participant in his evasion.
• Foreign aid carries a two-to-one domestic rule. Aid is eliminated as a baseline, but for every dollar ever appropriated abroad, two dollars must pass in the same act for Americans directly — veterans, infrastructure, disaster relief, food security, or debt principal. The defense budget counts for none of it, since letting it qualify would void the rule overnight. Military aid and weapons transfers count as aid at market value. It authorizes no new spending; it forces the trade to be made in public, in the same bill.
• The order of obligation: America first, the state or district you represent second, everything else after. Not Somalia first and Minnesota second. Not Israel first and Texas second. The plan does not tell an officeholder what to believe, which ally to favor, or which homeland to love — only where those rank while he holds an American seat. It forbids an inversion, not an opinion.
• Sole allegiance for federal office. Proof of renunciation is filed with the candidacy paperwork itself: no filing, no ballot access. Dual citizens may not hold clearances, senior appointments, or commissions without it either. Where a foreign state refuses to release a citizen, surrendering the passport and swearing sole allegiance satisfies it. A dual citizen who never seeks office keeps his second citizenship and every other right.
• Declaring that your office exists to serve a foreign nation is immediate grounds. Every country is treated identically — allies, adversaries, and ancestral homelands. A Texas senator holds a seat belonging to Texans; the office is a delegation of the American people's authority, not personal property to aim at a favored cause. Appointed officials and clearance holders are removed at once; elected officials face a mandatory privileged expulsion vote within 30 days that cannot be buried, plus an automatic recall election with no petition required.
• A worked example. Senator Ted Cruz told Tucker Carlson in 2025 that biblically we are commanded to support Israel. That is protected here and grounds for nothing — a religious conviction about what American policy should be, answerable at the ballot box. The harder case is a second statement, published by his own Senate office: that on being elected he resolved to be “the strongest defender of the State of Israel in the US Senate.” That is a statement of purpose in office rather than a policy view, and it triggers the process — the forced expulsion vote and automatic recall. It does not decide it: his colleagues and his voters weigh it against everything else he has said, including that his number one priority is jobs for Texans. The judgment belongs to them, on the record.
• The same standard, applied to the other party. The viral 2024 translation of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Somali-language speech is not used here: PolitiFact and a court-registered interpreter found it inaccurate, and hostile translation is inadmissible under this plan’s own evidence rule. What is admissible is the translation her office endorsed, in which she said, “While I am in Congress, no one will take Somalia’s sea.” That is the same species of statement as the Cruz resolution and triggers the same process, with the same real defense available. Two officeholders, two parties, one rule — a version that reaches one and spares the other is a weapon, not a principle.
• The line is a declaration of purpose, not a policy position. Voting for foreign aid, backing an alliance, or holding a religious or strategic conviction that America should support a country is untouched. Saying the seat exists to serve that country is not. Evidence is the officeholder's own words, published in full; if it takes interpretation to become a declaration of foreign allegiance, it is not one.
• Removal grounds are conduct, not opinion: acting at the direction of a foreign government, taking foreign money or position, disclosing protected information, concealing a foreign citizenship, or advocating the overthrow of the constitutional order. Condemning the country and its people is grounds too, where an officeholder repeatedly calls the United States or the American people evil or irredeemable, without evidence and without acknowledging any good. He is not criticizing a government; he is denouncing his own constituents.
• Criticizing the federal government is expressly excluded, in the statutory text. Any agency, official, policy, law, war, budget, or court ruling may be attacked as harshly and as often as an officeholder likes. Government is not the country, and criticizing the government is the job. Ambiguity resolves in favor of the speech.
• Only two bodies may act, and no tribunal is created: his constituents by recall election, or his own chamber by a two-thirds expulsion vote. He is not fined, prosecuted, or silenced — he keeps the right and loses the office, and may say the same words the next day as a private citizen.
• Super PACs themselves pay an entity tax of 10% on contributions received, collected at the point of receipt.
• Third-party candidacy becomes viable because every candidate clearing the viability threshold is funded identically. It ends politics as a contest over who can raise the most money from the wealthiest donors.

Lobbying

• Phase 1 ends everything legal today that should not be. No gifts at any value with no de minimis exception, no paid travel, no honoraria. Every lobbying contact disclosed same-day in a public record. Lobbying expenditures forfeit the spender's deductions and buy-down access for ten years, the same instrument applied to Super PAC donations.
• A ten-year revolving-door prohibition, extending to spouses and immediate family. This is the provision that matters most: a dinner is worth a few hundred dollars, while the implicit promise of a seven-figure job after office is what actually purchases policy, and current one- and two-year cooling-off periods are short enough to be priced in as a waiting cost.
• Phase 2 bans paid professional lobbying outright. This requires the amendment, because the First Amendment's Petition Clause protects paid lobbying as petitioning activity and no statute can reach it. A citizen petitioning his own representative, assembling with others, or speaking publicly remains untouched; what ends is the profession of being paid to obtain government action for a client.
• Money reaches an officeholder before election, during service, and after leaving. The Pot, the Super PAC deterrent, and these provisions address one problem at three points in time. Closing one channel alone reroutes the money rather than stopping it.

Government propaganda

• Reinstates the original Smith-Mundt ban that 2012 lifted: content the government produces to shape foreign opinion may not be aimed at Americans.
• Covert government propaganda becomes a real crime. Officials who fund undisclosed paid commentators, planted stories, or fake independent news face 3–10× restitution, prison for willful cases, and removal from office. In 2005 the Education Department paid a commentator $240,000 to promote its policy in secret, and nothing happened.
• Every federal dollar behind any content is disclosed on the content itself. Foreign-government media is labeled, with violations charged as fraud.
• No jawboning. No federal official may pressure an outlet or platform to suppress lawful speech. Every such contact is published, and citizens can sue the official personally.
• The private press is not regulated. A censorship power is only as safe as the worst administration that will ever hold it. The remedy for a slanted press is a government that cannot fund the slant or hide its own hand.

The ledger

Families reach the floor, not zero. Only 100% disabled veterans and true farmers reach 0%. Most households with families pay well under the cap.

Debt

Dedicated to principal	Annual
Levy floor earmark (0.5 pt)	$80–115B
Nickel Transactional Surcharge (5¢, debt-only)	$15B
Gold revaluation (one-time)	$1.055T

National debt: $40.1T. The Nickel Transactional Surcharge is a nickel added to every dollar-denominated transaction, roughly $48 per person annually, 100% dedicated to principal and never entering the general fund. It applies to every transaction settled in U.S. dollars, wherever it occurs, since a dollar-denominated contract anywhere draws on American monetary infrastructure and the stability behind the currency. It applies only while the nation carries debt, or during a national emergency threatening the continued existence of the Union — not a recession, a panic, a disaster, a pandemic, or a broad consensus that the moment is grave. Common consensus is not evidence. Emergency declarations require a named existential threat, independent audit certification, a five-year maximum, and are terminable by a 500-citizen jury on petition. It terminates automatically at zero debt. After retirement, surplus funds a citizens' dividend and a capped emergency reserve.

Phase 1 revenue	Annual
Levy (6.36% blended on $18.4T base, net of exemptions)	$1,143B
Protectionist tariffs	$550B
Less: retaliation buffer earmark (5% of tariffs)	–$28B
Social Security clawback	$275B
Consumption feedback $120B, contracting reform $100B, foreign aid $40B	$260B
Work-visa fee (H-1B and equivalents) $20B, remittance tax $20B, digital services $15B, golden visa $10B, land and mineral leasing $7B	$72B
Immigration enforcement	–$94B
Total general fund	$2,178B

Spending floor	Annual
Transition era (Social Security residual active)	$3,404B
Post-Social-Security	$2,644B
Gap, transition	–$1,226B
Gap, post-Social-Security	–$466B

Post-SS gap closes	Year
At 3% real growth (37% base growth)	11
At 5% real growth	6–7
At 7% real growth	5

Debt retired	Year
At 3% real growth	40
At 5% real growth	29
At 7% real growth	23

Alternatively the post-SS gap closes with no growth assumption at all, by raising the blended effective rate from 6.36% to 8.74% — still inside the 10% ceiling — which means narrowing the family deductions. Both routes are available.