The Citizens Standard as Counterfactual Benchmark: Empirical Analysis of an Alternative US Monetary Architecture, 1960–2055

This paper provides the first retrospective empirical reconstruction of the Citizens Standard monetary framework against US historical data. The architectural paper (Neo-Solon, 2026) proposes a constitutional monetary framework with three mode configurations and projects substantial retirement wealth outcomes under 2025 launch parameters. The present paper asks a different question: applied to actual US economic data from 1960 to 2025, what outcomes would the framework's Mode B configuration have produced for representative citizens, and how do those outcomes compare to what citizens actually experienced under the discretionary monetary system? Using an annual dataset drawn from authoritative public sources — FRED M2SL, BEA nominal GDP, BLS CPI-U, Census population, and S&P 500 total returns from Damodaran/NYU Stern through 2024 — we apply Mode B's K1 and K2 issuance formulas to four cohorts born in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. The central finding is that Mode B reliably produces a Stable Floor at retirement that exceeds the median American's actual retirement wealth by a factor of 1.9 to 4.0 across all four cohorts under central return assumptions. This finding holds for fully retrospective cohorts with high empirical confidence and for projected cohorts under all three return scenarios including pessimistic assumptions. A decomposition analysis reveals that approximately 96 percent of the framework's projected retirement wealth derives from compound equity returns on deposited principal; only 4 percent is the monetary principal itself. The Citizens Standard's contribution is to guarantee the structural conditions under which compounding can occur — universal participation, automatic deposits, constitutional locking, fee minimization, no early withdrawal — rather than to provide the wealth directly. Stress tests using Depression-era and stagflation-era equity sequences show that under catastrophic equity conditions during peak accumulation years, the framework's median advantage is significantly diminished or eliminated for the most adversely timed cohorts. Non-survivor analysis drawing on the Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton global returns dataset shows that the framework's structural advantages persist in any equity market that avoids confiscation, though absolute outcomes are proportional to country-level long-run equity returns. The paper concludes that the Citizens Standard is most accurately described as a structural retirement-security architecture — one that eliminates the behavioral and institutional leakages that cause median Americans to accumulate far less than a disciplined investor — rather than as a monetary-stimulus mechanism. Its principal social contribution is eliminating the savings-discipline lottery.