The Citizens Standard ยท the diagnosis
A dollar you saved in 2000 buys about 54 cents today. You didn’t spend it. It simply bought less every year.
Purchasing power of one US dollar, 1971 to today. Illustrative, from US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data (1971-2026).
Here is the strange part: that didn’t happen because you were careless. It happened because more dollars kept being made, and every new one made the ones you were holding worth a little less.
No one calls it a tax. But year after year it takes the same thing a tax would, a slice of what you earned and kept, and it takes the most from the people who did the responsible thing and saved.
Next year it takes a dollar and some change to buy what one dollar buys today: $1.x > $1. The “and some change” is the part that quietly leaves your pocket.
This isn’t a law of nature
Money is a human institution. It is unlike rain, which you cannot stop. What was made can be remade.
The erosion isn’t baked into money. It’s baked into who gets to make it, how much, and whether you had any say. You didn’t.
And the value that slips out of your dollar doesn’t evaporate. It goes to whoever spends the new money first. Just never you.
So the real question is who gets to decide, and where the difference goes. What if both answers were you?
See the difference
After 20 years, inflation has quietly taken 45¢ of every dollar you saved.
Figured at 3% inflation a year, close to the dollar’s long-run average. You can change that, and everything else, in the full engine.
That gap isn’t a forecast or an opinion. It’s just arithmetic: what happens to money that loses a few percent of its value every year, for years on end. The longer you do the responsible thing and save, the more it takes.
That’s one choice: money that holds its value. Citizens could pick differently, a little inflation for a larger dividend, and that’s the point. Nobody hands you a rate you never voted for. The choice belongs to the citizens, and however it’s set, the newly made money returns to you as a dividend and a locked savings floor instead of quietly leaving your pocket.
This is one dial out of many. And changing how money works isn’t a radical act. It’s your right.
The right to remake money →The founders named a right to remake any governing power that stops serving the people. A money system is one of those powers, and the Constitution already gives Congress the means to remake it. No amendment required.
This framework shares its diagnosis with another independent project, Public Cash Money.