Amir Goren is an independent researcher (Economics Ph.D., UC Irvine; M.S., MIT) and a macro investor.
- Steering AI without defining it: the Labor-Share Screen
Since the 2025 tax law, a firm deducts the full cost of automation equipment and qualifying software in the year it buys them, permanently, so the effective tax rate on automating is zero. Employing a person instead costs the employer 7.65 percent in payroll tax before anything the worker pays, and taxes on the whole job run roughly 25 to 30 percent. Firms are not choosing automation on the merits; they are paid to choose it. The fixes on the table, robot taxes and displacement surcharges triggered at a head count, as in New York's pending bill, sort firms into declared kinds. The firm draws that line itself, so the tax lands on the label rather than the choice, and a head-count trigger buys layoffs that stop just short of it.
The instrument: tax the outcome, not the machine. A firm owes a levy only if its workers' share of the value it creates falls below the lower of its own recent best and its sector's norm. Keep the gains shared, pay nothing. The levy is computed from numbers already on the tax return, payroll plus earnings before depreciation, so no agency has to define "AI," audit algorithms, or count robots, and expensing cannot shrink what it measures.
Read: one-pager, brief (6pp), paper: SSRN 7107538.
- Why health costs never fall: de-linking the middlemen
Nearly everyone with power over the health care bill is paid a percentage of it, so no one is paid to shrink it. National health spending is $5.3 trillion, 18 percent of GDP (2024); 2027 ACA filings ask a median 14 percent increase; the average family premium is $26,993 (2025). In February 2026 Congress took the first step, requiring Medicare Part D drug middlemen to be paid a flat fee that does not vary with the price of the drug, starting in 2028.
The instrument: finish the chain. Pay every middleman, insurers, brokers, the employer subsidy, in fixed dollars per member rather than a percentage of the bill, with a structure-contingent cap so integration is not an escape hatch. No rate-setting, no spending cut, just a change in what the industry is paid to do.
Read: one-pager · brief, 4pp · papers: SSRN 7106798 and 7106878.
- The inflation the Fed cannot fight: the Reaction-Function Ratchet
For decades U.S. monetary policy has treated a hot wage number as a reason to act and a fat profit margin as a reason to wait. Over a full cycle that asymmetry ratchets labor's share down: the corporate profit share sits near 18.8 percent (2026 Q2) against a 1970-1999 average near 11. Suppress wages long enough and demand weakens, debt props up consumption, and the politics turns to tariffs and deficits, fiscal dominance, the one inflation a central bank cannot raise rates to stop.
The instrument: symmetry, plus a fiscal partner aimed at the distribution. Payroll relief that lowers the cost of a raise, financed by a tax on above-trend margins built around the margin, not the rate, so it deters the gaming a published tolerance rule would invite.
Read: one-pager · brief, 7pp · papers: SSRN 7073658, 7102178, and 7102238.
4. The debt's only exit: the Escape Path and the Border Test
The federal debt and the suppressed wage share are one condition, not two problems: suppressed pay weakens demand, and public borrowing is what has been propping demand up. That is why the debt has an exit that runs through paychecks rather than austerity or debasement: an inflation led by wages is the only kind that erodes the debt, repairs the distribution, and rebuilds demand financed by pay, and a central bank reading only the price index tightens against it. The open economy raises the stakes. Roughly 30 percent of publicly held federal debt, $9.3 of $30.9 trillion at end-2025, is held abroad, much of it the mirror of suppressed wages in surplus economies, and the border instruments sold as pro-worker split cleanly: tariffs tax the very wage recovery they advertise, while capital-flow management can help, but only switched on by a certified wage recovery and switched off on a schedule.
The instrument: a tolerance rule gated on the labor-share statistic, read on the prices of what domestic labor produces, plus a three-part border test that any instrument must pass, no corrupted statistic, no tax on the recovering wage base, a debt position made better, not worse.
Read: one-pager · papers: SSRN 7182678 and SSRN 7187238
Contact: Amir Goren, goren.amir@gmail.com.