Amir Goren is an independent researcher (Economics Ph.D., UC Irvine; M.S., MIT) and a macro investor.

The tax code now charges an employer roughly 25 percentage points more, per dollar, to employ a person than to replace one, and the 2025 tax law made that gap permanent. Firms are not choosing automation on the merits; they are paid to choose it. Washington's answer so far is two bills that tax the machine, a robot, a data center, which hit good and bad adoption alike and push displacement offshore where the tax cannot see it.

The instrument: tax the outcome, not the machine. A firm adopting AI faces a levy on its above-normal profit margins only if its workers' share of income falls. Keep the gains shared, pay nothing. No agency has to define "AI," audit algorithms, or count robots; the IRS already collects every number required.

Read: one-pager · brief, 7pp · papers: SSRN 7107538 and 7107558.

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.

For four 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 17.6 percent (2025 Q4) 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 31 percent of publicly held federal debt, $9.2 of $30.1 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 · brief (6pp) · papers: SSRN 7182678 and SSRN 7187238

Contact: Amir Goren, goren.amir@gmail.com.