It started with the crash and depression of 2008-2009. Consumers had finally lost the ability to float global business with their credit cards and home equity loans.
Finally even the politicians had to face the facts. Ever since the 1980s, when the economy was handed over for plundering to the banks and the Wall Street plutocrats, ordinary people had struggled just to survive.
Except for a handful of fabulously wealthy oligarchs, almost everyone else was drowning in debt. Prices of gasoline, food, and health care had continued to skyrocket. The housing bubble collapse had left whole cities of foreclosed homes only providing shelter to homeless people.
Overseas the U.S. had become a mockery, with the military fighting wars on every continent in a futile attempt to retain the hegemony of a U.S. dollar whose value had evaporated. The twilight of the American empire had arrived as the alliance of Russia, China, and India flexed its muscles.
Finally the American people had enough and elected a President with the guts to challenge the fundamental problem—a debt-based currency which subjected the population to slavery at the hands of the financial magnates who had ruled since the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
The first thing the President did was declare a National Dividend—an immediate cash stipend to all citizens averaging $15,000 per person per year. It was like the Alaska Permanent Fund but much larger.
The Dividend was granted to everyone regardless of whether they were working or not. It was the rightful share of the entire population in the producing bounty of an industrial economy. It was the share the banks had been stealing for so long by putting everyone in debt just for the necessities of life.
Of course many who had been living in starvation conditions were happy to use their Dividend to live without working. This was to be expected. But for most, the Dividend provided a new lease on life.
People could finally begin to pay off their loans and start anew. Students could attend college again without being shackled to decades of debt. Families were no longer one illness away from financial ruin.
In rural areas, the family farms which had been wiped off the map by agribusiness made a comeback. The inner cities whose economies had been devastated once again saw small businesses flourish.
And along with financial security, joy and well-being were returning to a land that had been haunted for so long by greed and fear.
The National Dividend had saved America.