To understand the Data Savings Act, start with the Treaty of Detroit. In May 1950, after a 113 day strike and three rounds of postwar negotiation, General Motors and the United Auto Workers signed a five year contract that became the template for postwar American capitalism. It did not give workers a stipend. It gave them a stake. Seventy five years later, that single decision underpins $49 trillion in American retirement wealth. The pages that follow show why the same architecture, applied to data, is the most credible answer to AI driven displacement.
There is a rideshare driver somewhere right now navigating city streets, logging routes, calibrating surge pricing. He thinks he's earning a living. He is paying for the car, the gas, and the insurance, all while feeding the platform the data that makes its AI smarter. At his own expense, he is building the autonomous vehicle that will replace him.
The car is not the exception. It is the template. Who pays the energy bill, the carrier fee, and the monthly installment on the device that pumps your behavioral data into the cloud twenty four hours a day? You do. The phone in your pocket is not a product you bought. It is a data collection terminal you are paying to operate.
Artificial intelligence is not a technology story. It is a distribution story. And right now, we are telling it very badly. Over the past decade, AI has compressed the middle class from both directions at once, automating white collar tasks that once required judgment while boosting the productivity of lower wage work. What looks like efficiency on a quarterly earnings call is something else on a labor force chart: hollowing.
The standard political response is Universal Basic Income: a monthly transfer to displaced workers, an acknowledgment that their economic contribution has become obsolete. It is a compassionate idea built on a defeatist premise. The issue is not that people have stopped contributing to the economy. The issue is that the economy no longer recognizes their contributions.
We have been here before.
of Americans have less than $500 in cash savings.
of Americans have a net worth of $0 or less.
Americans (10.6%) live below the official poverty line.
of Americans don’t have enough cash on hand to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.
For seventy five years, Social Security has been the floor under American retirement. It is the institution most Americans assume will catch them, and it is the one most visibly failing. The 2025 Trustees Report, issued in June by the Social Security Administration, now projects the combined Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance trust funds will run out of reserves in 2034. A full year earlier than the prior projection. At that point, only 77 percent of scheduled benefits would be payable from incoming payroll tax revenue. Everything above that line becomes an automatic cut.
The program has been running below its non interest income every year since 2010. In 2024 alone, reserves fell by $67 billion to $2.72 trillion. The 75 year actuarial deficit widened from 3.50% to 3.82% of taxable payroll. These are not forecasts of possible trouble. They are the official ledger of a system already in structural deficit. 185 million Americans paying in, 70 million drawing benefits, and a clock that now reads less than a decade.
The year the combined Social Security trust funds are projected to be depleted. One year sooner than last year's projection.
Automatic benefit cut at OASI Trust Fund depletion in 2033 absent Congressional action. Only 77% of promised benefits would be payable.
of Americans under 30 believe Social Security will still exist by the time they retire.
of Gen Z respondents expect reduced benefits, compared to 56% of current retirees who expect the same.
In 1950, Social Security paid a benefit of roughly $32 a month. Postwar inflation had gutted its real value. Workers entering the new industrial economy faced the same question today's Gen Z faces: a federal backstop that existed on paper but would not carry them through retirement. That gap is what the Treaty of Detroit filled. Not by replacing Social Security, but by building a new institutional layer above it.
The Data Savings Act answers the same kind of question, in the same kind of moment. Social Security will still exist in 2034. It will simply cover roughly four fifths of what was promised, at the exact moment AI is displacing the work that pays into it.
The floor is dropping while the ceiling is rising. Something must be built in between.
After World War II, the United States faced a structural economic disruption of comparable magnitude to what AI represents today. Industrial productivity was surging. Traditional labor was being displaced. Workers entering the new economy had no bridge between present wages and future security.
The answer was not a government check. It was an institutional change. In May 1950, General Motors and the United Auto Workers, after three rounds of postwar negotiation, after a 113 day strike, after the rival Chrysler strike had left 100,000 Detroiters out of work, signed a five year contract that became the template for postwar American capitalism. It included a fully funded, actuarially sound pension plan paying up to $117 per month at age 65, cost of living adjustments tied to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and company funded health coverage.
Ford and Chrysler signed identical pacts within weeks. The logic then rippled outward. By 1970, more than half of all U.S. collective bargaining agreements contained COLA provisions, and more than a third provided for pensions. The standard of living for UAW members roughly doubled during Walter Reuther's tenure. In 1974, Congress codified these protections in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA, which extended the framework to the entire American middle class.
Pensions did not compensate workers for being displaced. They recognized that labor hours had residual value beyond the paycheck, and built the institutional machinery to capture that value over a lifetime. Work became ownership. Pension funds became the largest class of institutional investors the world had ever seen.
That, not a stipend, is the American template for a structural economic transition. And it is the only one that has ever worked at scale.
The two systems share the same institutional architecture. What differs is the underlying asset. In 1950, it was industrial labor. In 2026, it is digital participation.
Universal Basic Income treats displaced workers as casualties requiring compensation rather than participants capable of generating new forms of value.
It operates on the premise that human economic contribution has become obsolete, a premise that misdiagnoses the problem. AI systems require continuous streams of human generated data to function and improve.
A UBI is a transfer. It creates no asset, no institution, no compounding wealth, no claim on the productive system that is replacing human labor.
The Data Savings Act recognizes data generation as a legitimate form of economic contribution. The same way a factory worker's hours fund a pension, a citizen's continuous digital participation would fund their future.
Participation becomes ownership. Contribution becomes a compounding financial asset held in a personal account, professionally managed, fiduciary protected.
UBI compensates for exclusion. Data Savings rewards inclusion.
I claim my right to own the data I produce and to participate in the value it creates. I believe the AI economy deserves to be governed with the same institutional seriousness America once applied to the industrial era. Add my name to the public record in Washington, D.C., in support of the Data Savings Act.
