The Citizens Standard · the diagnosis
A dollar you put away in 2000 buys about 54 cents today. You didn’t spend it. Nobody picked your pocket. It simply bought less every year.
Purchasing power of one US dollar, 1971–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. There’s no line on a form, no bill in the mail. 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.
And here is the part almost no one says out loud: this isn’t a law of nature.
Rain, you can’t stop. Money, you can — because money is the one thing in your life that was designed, from scratch, by people. Anything people designed, people can design differently.
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.
So there’s really only one question worth asking: what if money were built so that a dollar saved stayed a dollar?
See how it can work →We’ve worked out exactly how — the rules, the model, the stress tests, an engine you can run yourself. That part is for whenever you want to go deeper. You don’t need any of it to see the problem. You already felt it.
This framework shares its diagnosis with another independent project, Public Cash Money. Two architectures, one engine.