THE BOOTSTRAP BILL
A Proposal for a National Voluntary Basic Income Trust, Artist Relief Infrastructure, and Civic Cash Distribution System
Submitted for consideration to the Executive and Legislative Branches of the United States Government
Proposed by Shaina Laber
Cover Letter / Introductory Statement
To the offices entrusted with the economic and moral direction of the United States:
The first time I heard the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” I remember thinking, even as a child, that it was a ridiculous statement.
Not just because it is physically absurd.
Not just because it has always been used to sanctify struggle while excusing neglect.
But because the real question is simpler and crueler:
What happens when a person doesn’t even have boots?
What happens when a person has talent but no money?
What happens when a person has discipline but no safety net?
What happens when a person has vision but no room to survive long enough to realize it?
What happens when an artist, a caregiver, a laid-off worker, a disabled person, a student, a single mother, or a man rebuilding after collapse is told to “bootstrap” their way upward from bare feet on broken ground?
A society that answers that question with lectures instead of infrastructure is not a serious society.
I grew up in Chabad-Lubavitch, where we were told that in the days of Moshiach, money would grow from trees.
As a child, I understood that as fantasy.
As an adult, I understand it differently.
It was not about magic in the childish sense.
It was about a future in which sustenance would no longer be treated as impossible.
A world in which abundance would not be hoarded behind locked systems and then moralized as merit.
A world in which people would not be expected to prove their right to live before they were permitted to eat.
The United States should build one small part of that world now.
This proposal, The Bootstrap Bill, is a plan to create a national, opt-in, voluntary basic income system that does not depend on new taxation or unstable congressional budget fights, and that is distributed in a way that is human, visible, culturally meaningful, and artistically generative.
It is a proposal not only about money, but about how a nation imagines dignity.
THE BOOTSTRAP BILL
Executive Summary
The Bootstrap Bill proposes the creation of a federally chartered, independently governed National Basic Support Trust funded through:
major philanthropic contributions from high-net-worth Americans and institutions, voluntary 1% charitable giving from the broader public, estate and stock donations, corporate and foundation partnerships, and public-private cultural sponsorships.
This trust would fund a national opt-in basic income system, beginning with targeted pilots and eventually scaling into a permanent civic support structure.
The program would distribute monthly cash stipends directly to recipients through a culturally distinctive delivery system:
cash delivered in artist-designed envelopes featuring American tree motifs
This design is not ornamental. It is the point.
The Bootstrap Bill proposes that:
cash support should feel visible, material, and dignified the delivery itself should create paid work for American artists and the act of receiving should be reframed from shame to participation in a national commons
At a time when artificial intelligence threatens to destabilize creative labor and compress the value of human-made art, the Bootstrap Bill also establishes an Artist Envelope Commission Program, allowing American artists to submit envelope designs for paid national circulation.
In this model, the country does two things at once:
it puts money in people’s hands, and it puts work in artists’ hands.
That is not symbolic excess.
That is intelligent nation-building.
I. The Problem
The United States has three simultaneous crises:
1. Material insecurity
Millions of Americans remain one emergency away from collapse.
2. Institutional exhaustion
Public aid systems are often humiliating, fragmented, underfunded, and politically unstable.
3. Cultural and creative precarity
Artists, writers, designers, illustrators, musicians, and cultural workers are increasingly being displaced, devalued, or algorithmically absorbed in the age of AI.
These are not separate crises.
They are all expressions of the same deeper failure:
America has immense wealth, but no coherent cultural mechanism for circulating it with dignity.
The result is a nation where people are told to survive on resilience while capital pools upward, public institutions erode, and creative labor is treated as decorative rather than foundational.
The Bootstrap Bill answers this by creating a new national support architecture that is:
voluntary, transparent, artistically generative, culturally legible, and materially real.
II. Legislative Purpose
The Bootstrap Bill is designed to do five things:
1. Create a national off-budget support system
so that basic income does not rise or fall entirely with partisan appropriations.
2. Provide direct cash support
to Americans who opt in.
3. Support artists in the age of AI
by embedding paid design and cultural labor into the distribution mechanism itself.
4. Restore moral visibility to giving
by allowing recipients to see who helped fund their support.
5. Reframe economic dignity as a civic and cultural project
rather than a bureaucratic or purely technocratic one.
III. Core Concept
The Bootstrap Bill asks a simple question:
If people are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, why does this country not first ensure that they have boots?
And if it cannot ensure boots, then it should at least ensure cash.
Not endless paperwork.
Not digital maze architecture.
Not suspicion.
Not degradation.
Cash.
Visible, usable, immediate support.
IV. Structural Design of the Program
A. Creation of the National Basic Support Trust (NBST)
The Bootstrap Bill establishes a federally chartered National Basic Support Trust, hereafter “the Trust,” which shall:
receive voluntary contributions from private individuals and institutions, hold and manage endowment and reserve funds, distribute monthly stipends to enrolled recipients, and administer public-facing reporting and artistic distribution programs.
This Trust would function as a public-interest, federally recognized, independently governed support institution, similar in seriousness to a national endowment or public-benefit trust.
It would be designed to complement government anti-poverty systems without being structurally dependent on annual budget fights.
V. Who Pays for It
This proposal is built around a straightforward answer to the question that kills most UBI proposals:
Who will pay for it?
Answer: the people and institutions who already can.
The Bootstrap Bill does not begin by demanding that Congress fully finance a permanent national UBI out of tax revenues.
Instead, it creates a national voluntary funding system rooted in American traditions of:
charity, philanthropy, religious giving, civic obligation, and public prestige.
Funding comes from two main streams:
A. The One Percent Funders
The wealthiest Americans and institutions are invited into a formal giving structure under which they make significant recurring contributions to the Trust.
This includes:
high-net-worth individuals, celebrities, family offices, executives, investors, philanthropic foundations, donor-advised funds, corporate giving arms, and estate donors.
These contributors can fund:
individuals, local pools, city pilots, artist stipend tracks, or reserve/endowment pools.
This is not framed as pity.
It is framed as:
civic ballast
A healthy society expects those who benefit most from its stability to contribute materially to its continuance.
B. The 99% Civic Tithe
The broader public is invited to contribute:
1% of earnings and/or 1% of non-essential wealth
This is entirely voluntary.
Examples:
$10/month $25/month $40/month seasonal or annual contributions payroll-linked contributions bank-linked recurring giving tax-season one-click contributions
The point is not to overburden the public.
The point is to establish a national principle:
Everyone belongs to the circulation of the country.
VI. The Distribution Model
A. Opt-In Enrollment
The Bootstrap Bill establishes an opt-in basic support system.
No person is forced into participation.
Eligible recipients may include:
low-income workers caregivers artists students gig workers disabled adults laid-off workers elders transitional housing residents and others facing instability
Participation can begin with broad eligibility in pilot cities and expand over time.
B. Monthly Stipend
The Trust distributes a monthly stipend in phases, for example:
Pilot Support Tier: $250/month Stability Tier: $500/month Creative Survival Tier: $750/month Full Basic Tier: $1,000/month
Amounts can scale according to reserve health and donor participation.
VII. The Signature Delivery Mechanism
The Tree Envelope Program
This is the heart of the Bootstrap Bill’s civic imagination.
Rather than distributing support in a way that is invisible, sterile, or purely digital, the Bootstrap Bill proposes a recognizable national format:
Monthly cash support delivered in artist-designed envelopes featuring tree motifs
This design draws from a simple image:
If in the world to come money grows from trees, then in this world we can at least choose to make support arrive like a small branch of that promise.
The envelope is not a gimmick.
It is a national object of dignity.
It should feel:
deliberate, beautiful, collectable, American, and unmistakably human.
A. Why Physical Cash and Envelope Design Matter
A physical envelope:
creates ritual and visibility, feels materially real to recipients, avoids the emotional coldness of invisible transfer systems, and transforms support into an event rather than a spreadsheet entry.
It also allows the country to make the distribution system itself into a source of work and cultural meaning.
That matters.
A nation is not only what it funds.
It is how it hands things to people.
B. Tree Motif Requirement
Each envelope design must incorporate tree imagery, interpreted broadly through American artistic traditions.
Examples include:
oaks maples sycamores cottonwoods magnolias Joshua trees redwoods pecans apple trees citrus groves neighborhood street trees ancestral trees immigrant orchard imagery urban tree roots breaking concrete seasonal tree cycles memorial trees family tree motifs
This allows the program to evoke:
rootedness, shelter, regeneration, labor, fruitfulness, and the idea that money should circulate like growth, not sit like rot.
VIII. The American Artist Envelope Commission Program
A. Purpose
The Bootstrap Bill establishes a national artist commission program to produce official monthly envelope designs.
This serves two functions:
1. It creates a new stream of paid federal-adjacent cultural work
for artists, illustrators, printmakers, designers, photographers, and visual storytellers.
2. It transforms the act of distribution into a living national gallery of American imagination.
In an age where AI can flood markets with synthetic aesthetics, the United States should deliberately create systems that say:
Human-made art still belongs in public life.
B. Administration
This component should be administered in coordination with:
the National Endowment for the Arts regional arts councils local arts institutions and independent juried review panels
C. Artist Submission Categories
Submissions may be invited in rotating categories such as:
Working America Neighborhood Trees Immigrant Roots American Seasons Hands and Harvest The Future of Labor Artists After Automation Urban Orchard Boots and Branches Cash Crop / Civic Crop The Tree of Life in America
Artists selected receive:
commission payment, national circulation credit, exhibition rights, and inclusion in an annual public archive.
D. Special Artist Support Track
A designated portion of the Trust may be used to create a Creative Survival Track, under which artists themselves can be recipients of monthly support.
This recognizes a basic truth:
A country that consumes art but will not sustain artists is cannibalizing its own imagination.
IX. Visible Funding and Donor Transparency
One of the strongest design features of the Bootstrap Bill is that recipients are not meant to receive support from a faceless void.
Each envelope or enclosed insert may indicate who helped fund that month’s stipend.
Examples:
This month’s support was made possible by:
The Rubin Family Trust
10 contributors in the Dime Spread
1 anonymous donor in the One Percent Circle
Or:
This month’s support was fully funded by:
A sole funder from Illinois
This does not grant donors access or power over recipients.
It simply restores a moral fact:
support comes from somewhere, and that somewhere should not be hidden.
X. Donor Spread System
To organize participation, the Bootstrap Bill adopts a spread structure for pooled giving.
A. Sole Funder
One major donor fully funds a recipient’s monthly stipend.
B. Nickel Spread
5 contributors pooled.
C. Dime Spread
10 contributors pooled.
D. Quarter Spread
25 contributors pooled.
E. Silver Dollar Spread
100 contributors pooled.
This gives both major and ordinary donors a visible way to participate.
No contribution is too small to matter.
No donor is too grand to stand outside obligation.
XI. Why This Helps in the Age of AI
The Bootstrap Bill is not merely an anti-poverty proposal.
It is also a response to a looming economic and cultural problem:
AI will intensify the instability of creative labor faster than most institutions are prepared to address.
As AI-generated content expands, millions of Americans working in and around the creative economy will face:
downward price pressure, replacement anxiety, devaluation of original labor, and a shrinking ability to sustain themselves between commissions or projects.
This bill addresses that in two ways:
1. Direct support
Artists can receive basic support as recipients.
2. Embedded paid commissions
Artists are paid to shape the public-facing visual identity of the system itself.
This is elegant policy design.
It does not treat art as a side concern.
It treats art as part of the circulatory tissue of national life.
XII. Pilot Program Recommendation
The Bootstrap Bill should begin with a three-city pilot and a national artist call.
Suggested pilot cities:
Chicago New York City Atlanta
These cities provide:
cultural diversity, philanthropic density, visible economic inequality, strong arts communities, and strong local infrastructure for evaluation.
Pilot goals:
1,000 recipients per city 12-month support period 10,000+ active contributors 36 rotating artist envelope commissions in year one
XIII. Governance and Integrity Protections
For credibility and durability, the Trust must be governed with rigor.
Required safeguards:
1. Independent Board
Including:
economists anti-poverty experts artists ethicists labor representatives recipient representatives compliance experts major donor representatives without controlling power
2. Public Transparency Dashboard
Publishing:
funds raised reserve ratios payout totals recipient counts administrative overhead artist commissions paid geographic distribution
3. Hard Administrative Cap
Recommended:
no more than 10% overhead
4. Recipient Privacy and Anti-Control Rules
Donors must not be allowed to:
contact recipients, influence recipient behavior, moralize support, or condition giving on ideology or lifestyle.
This cannot become digital feudalism in a pretty envelope.
The support must remain:
free, dignified, and non-coercive
XIV. Why the U.S. Government Should Support This
Even if the federal government does not directly fund the stipend pool at full scale, it should support the Bootstrap Bill because it advances national goals in at least six areas:
1. Poverty reduction
2. Workforce stabilization
3. Mental health and household stress reduction
4. Artist and cultural worker retention
5. Public-private civic trust building
6. Innovation in non-bureaucratic support delivery
The government should not be embarrassed to support models that are beautiful.
Beauty is not inefficiency.
Beauty is one of the few things people still trust.
XV. Requested Federal Actions
The Bootstrap Bill requests that the federal government:
1. Charter or authorize the National Basic Support Trust
through federal legislation or pilot authorization.
2. Direct the National Endowment for the Arts
to establish a partnership framework for the Artist Envelope Commission Program.
3. Authorize Treasury and/or HHS partnership
for pilot compliance, evaluation, and benefit interaction planning.
4. Create a federal recognition pathway
for voluntary payroll and tax-season contributions to the Trust.
5. Support pilot evaluation
through independent academic and policy research partnerships.
6. Permit state and municipal co-pilots
for local adaptation and scaling.
XVI. Moral Rationale
A country reveals its theology whether it names one or not.
Right now, ours says:
earn or disappear, produce or panic, adapt or starve, and if you fail, call it character-building.
That is not a serious moral order.
The Bootstrap Bill proposes a different civic theology:
Before a person can build, they must be held.
Before a person can create, they must breathe.
Before a person can climb, they must stand.
Before a person can be told to pull themselves upward, they must first be given something to stand in.
Boots, if possible.
Cash, at minimum.
And if the cash arrives in an envelope wrapped in branches, designed by an artist whose own rent was paid because the country decided human imagination still matters, then all the better.
That is not childish fantasy.
That is a nation remembering how to act like one.
XVII. Closing Statement
I submit this proposal because America does not only need better economics.
It needs better symbols attached to economics.
It needs a support system that does not feel like punishment.
It needs a way to tell people:
You are not a failed machine.
You are a citizen, a worker, a dreamer, a maker, a parent, a body, a life.
And this month, the country chose not to let you disappear.
If we are going to keep telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, then we should at least be honest enough to admit that many people were never given boots.
The Bootstrap Bill is a proposal to answer that failure with something concrete.
Something fundable.
Something buildable.
Something beautiful.
Something American.
Respectfully submitted,
Shaina Laber
Bnei Adam 