What is 50% per capita VAPI?

by metavalent

First and foremost, it is a much appreciated DOGE correction to something I was wrong about for almost 20 years.

A #PiDay2025 Bug Patch

I’m pretty confident that someone in some rulial shard of the so-called deep-state-space-spliterverse has a rough tally of how many times I’ve repeated “50% per capita GDP” until it became true. That measure of irritation (to both parties, I’m sure) is not the point I wish to make here, however.

I was wrong. For all that impressively focused and productive time and effort — and even success — much like the entirety of the 20th century American experiment, I was optimizing for the wrong metric. Similar to the macro-misorientation of Fiduciary Duty is U.S. Code in the 20th century.

Turns out that GDP is not the best measure of one of the main currents of a life’s work focus; namely, ending poverty as we’ve known it by adapting MLK’s (apparently, half a century ahead of its time; or half a century late, depending on one’s perspective) guaranteed annual income proposal for the 21st century by completely restructuring the Social Security Trust Fund from a sound and sustainable mathematical foundation.

Something called VAPI is a much more useful and precise metric, as I recently learned from the remarkable work of DOGE, the independent auditing Department Of Government Efficiency, established by the second Trump administration.

What is VAPI?

VAPI is the data symbol for the Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED)’s measure of Value Added by Industry: Private Industries (VAPI).

^{Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Release: Gross Domestic Product by Industry. Units: Billions of Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate Frequency: Quarterly}

Notes:

Value added represents the sum of the costs-incurred and the incomes-earned in production, and consists of compensation of employees, taxes on production and imports, less subsidies, and gross operating surplus. This product uses the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Data API but is not endorsed or certified by BEA. Suggested Citation: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Value Added by Industry: Private Industries [VAPI], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPI, March 14, 2025.

What does this mean for re-indexing of Universal Social Security?

The 2024 book, The Post-Automation Era: Toward a World That Works for Everyone outlines a “Third Millennium Policy Framework” and math based upon 50% per capita GDP. Since it was published one year ago this month, it’s too late to correct; however, it is a simple single variable replacement that does not affect the logical stucture of the proposed:

The Social Security Accelerating Future Empowerment and Trust Revitalization Act: The SAFER Trust Act, designed to provide a guaranteed annual income in the form of a citizen’s technology dividend, indexed to 50% per capita GDP**.

The correction reads:

The Social Security Accelerating Future Empowerment and Trust Revitalization Act: The SAFER Trust Act, designed to provide a guaranteed annual income in the form of a citizen’s technology dividend, indexed to 50% per capita VAPI**.

The most currrent data, from January 2005 through July 2024 is:

I suppose it’s just an OSINT occupational hazard of showing ALL YOUR WORK, including crappy, embarrassing scrap paper, all out on the public interwebs for some 30 years. It’s not an excuse, it’s motivation to dedicate some time to pruning more dead wood and creating a kind of Table of Contents post that brings this all together in a more presentable way. What’s the point of finding solutions to some of our most pressing and pernicious problems if I can’t communicate it succinctly and clearly in a way that Policy Makers can realistically IMPLEMENT in #TheWorldOfTheReal, right?

Onward.

• Principle > Party
• Policy > Persona
• Data > Dogma
• ACCURACY ⩸ TRUTH

#EPluribusUnum as a verb. 🤖🧠⚖️💖🕊️

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