Chris McCoy's approach to policy does not begin with political compromise. It begins with mathematics. Conservative and liberal priorities both get satisfied through structural design rather than negotiation. The math produces the outcome. Neither side has to trust the other. Both sides can verify the results.
The foundation is constitutional mathematics — the discovery that stable, capture-resistant systems require no single actor to hold more than one-third control. Five independent governance systems across eight centuries arrived at this same mathematical threshold without ever citing each other. McCoy discovered the connection in 2017 and built the production experiment to test it.
The goal: coordination mechanisms that make better outcomes the structurally dominant strategy — not the hoped-for one.
Groceries cost more. Housing is out of reach. Your paycheck buys less. No matter which party runs Washington, the problem gets worse.
That feeling is not a political opinion. It is a mathematical diagnosis.
I grew up on food stamps, free lunch, and Medicaid in Kelso, Washington.
When Reynolds Metals closed in 2001, my hometown lost 600 workers at peak. The factory had sponsored my youth baseball team. Our jerseys said Reynolds on the front. When the plant closed, the jerseys stopped. Not because the workers failed. Because the math made leaving cheaper than staying.
When I aged off Medicaid at 18, my grandfather Jack – a 36-year US Postal Service mail carrier – made a single phone call and found me a $25-a-month health plan. It carried me into college. It paid for the screens that showed me what I would need to watch for as an adult.
It was not enough. But it was something. In 46 states at the time, there was nothing.
That gap between what Jack found and what 46 states offered is the entire research. I have spent twelve years building the math that does what Jack did – at scale, for every Kelso in America.
Five civilizations derived the same mathematical rule without ever citing each other.
The American founders encoded it into the Constitution nine times collectively.
The number is one-third. When no single actor controls more than a third of anything that matters, the system self-corrects. Cooperation becomes more profitable than extraction. Cross that line and the system extracts until it breaks. Every time. Without exception. Across 800 years of documented human governance.
Not a theory. A law that keeps getting rediscovered.
In 2017, I found the connection between Hamilton's governance mathematics and Lamport's computing mathematics. They are the same theorem. That is the foundation of everything that follows.
126 governors across 30+ countries. Approximately $30 million in private market capitalization governed. Nine years. Zero constitutional violations. Maximum governance concentration: 0.8%. To breach the system, 42 governors would have to collude simultaneously across 30 countries. It has never been tested. It has never needed to be.
Same town. Same math. This is where the research lives right now.
Every network follows Metcalfe's Law: value grows with the square of the number of participants. The math pulls everything toward the center. The open internet became five companies. Frontier AI is controlled by six labs. Your hometown lost its newspaper, its hospital, its middle class – not because of bad policy. Because of physics.
The constraint reverses this. When no single actor holds more than one-third, the system self-corrects. Cooperation becomes more profitable than extraction. That is the math I want to change.
Reynolds Metals closed in Longview in 2001. The math made leaving cheaper than staying. I want to change that math.
Companies that hire American workers at fair wages earn the lowest rate. Companies that offshore pay more. The gradient does the work.
| American workforce threshold | Fair wages | Tax rate |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | Yes | 13% |
| 80%+ | Yes | 18% |
| 70%+ | Yes | 18% |
| 60%+ | — | 21% |
| 40%+ | Yes | 24% |
| 40%+ | No | 28% |
| Under 40% | — | 35% |
At 100% American workforce with fair wages: 13%. At 80% or more with fair wages: 18%. At 70% or more with fair wages: 18%. At 60% or more: 21%. At 40% or more: 24% to 28% depending on wages. Under 40%: 35%.
Ireland's corporate rate is 12.5% – the most competitive in the developed world. At 13%, a company that keeps its workers and pays them fairly is number two in the world. That is a competitive advantage, not a burden.
When a company earns the lower rate, part of what it saves flows back to the community it hired from. The Hometown Return: at minimum 2.5% of assets, or 150% of the tax savings – whichever is larger. Every company. No exceptions.
The math makes staying more profitable than leaving. That is the only way Reynolds Metals comes back to Kelso.
One question: is your community growing faster than its debt? Growth beats burden – dream loop. Burden beats growth – doom loop.
America's current score: 36.9. The doom loop is running.
Hamilton's Gift — an unconditional floor built into the architecture — flows from Year 1 on existing IRS rails. $303 per person. No score threshold. No waiting. No politics. No discretion.
Cross 51 and the doom loop becomes the dream loop. The Constitutional Surplus begins. Cross 67 and it fires fully: 40% to American Dream Accounts, 33% to the 20 Trusted Funds, 25% to federal debt reduction.
Two numbers. You cannot game a score that is just two numbers.
Washington State proved in 1987 that states pooling their residents – the way Costco pools its members – can negotiate rates that no individual could get alone. New York's version generated $9.8 billion in surplus over eight years. The mechanism works. Forty-six states have not used it.
No single company above one-third of any AI system. No single country above one-third of any critical supply chain. Taiwan produces more than half the world's most advanced semiconductors. One conflict ends global computing. The threshold is the correction. The math does not negotiate. It does not lobby. It enforces.
The American founders did not ask citizens to be altruistic. They built a system in which self-interested actors, operating under the right constraints, produce cooperative outcomes. Unity from structure, not from force.
That is not an aspiration. It is a design specification.
Trusted America is the research proposal to apply it to the national economy. Amazon came. 33% stays. Japan bought bonds. Barnes Elementary gets the art class back. Not because of a new program. Because the math redirected what was already moving.
For every Kelso in America.
The experiment is small. The math, if correct, is not.
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