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This essay argues that America’s real crisis isn’t just inequality—it’s the collapse of mobility in a high-churn, high-immigration society. Instead of protectionist nostalgia or minimalist fatalism, it outlines a “mobility state”: a model designed to expand portable benefits, capital access, skill mobility, and geographic freedom. The result is a framework that cuts across left/right divides and rebuilds the American promise as a fairer climb, not a bigger cushion.
Take a thirty-year-old juggling a patchwork life in a big metro. She drives for two apps in the morning, stocks shelves on a short-term contract at night, and splits rent with roommates because buying into the housing market feels like science fiction. When her hours get cut or an algorithm changes, there is no buffer beyond a maxed-out credit card and a savings account that never quite fills. She is not lazy, not reckless, and not alone. Her story is what the old American promise sounds like when it starts to fray.
For most of American history, the country’s favorite promise has been simple: work hard, play by the rules, and you can move up. The details changed by era and region, but the core bargain felt stable enough that millions of people were willing to bet their lives on it. Today, that promise feels less like a rule and more like a rumor. Wealth and power have consolidated at the top; housing, health care, and education eat up a growing share of paychecks; and what used to look like a climb now feels, for many, like running in place.
You can see it most clearly in the lives built on the edges of the old structure. Gig workers who knit together three apps to make rent. Young renters who cannot imagine owning a home in the places where opportunity clusters. Immigrants who do everything right—study, work, pay taxes—only to discover that their credentials vanish in a maze of licensing boards and opaque requirements. For them, the path upward no longer looks like a clear route. It looks more like a maze with locked gates and missing exits. The result is not just hardship, but a spreading sense that the game itself has quietly changed—that it is not only hard, but rigged.
In a previous essay, I argued that this tension sits on top of a deeper structural story about what kind of country America is. The United States, I suggested, is fundamentally better suited to dynamism and high immigration than to a Scandinavian-style protection state. Its geography, history, and political culture point toward a society that is constantly in motion: people moving across states, across borders, and across industries. Rather than a small, tightly managed, homogeneous welfare state, America has behaved more like an open, restless port—messy, noisy, and perpetually receiving new ships.
If that is true, then building a social model that treats America as a would-be Sweden with worse manners is a category mistake. A more natural fit is what I called a “mobility state”: public institutions designed not to freeze people in place, but to help them move—between jobs, regions, and life stages—without falling through the cracks. In this view, the state’s job is not to insulate citizens from change in a stable world, but to equip them to navigate a world where change is the baseline condition.
That brings us to the puzzle this essay tries to confront more directly. If so many Americans would welcome simple, practical steps to restore a fair shot at mobility, why are we stuck? Poll after poll suggests broad support for ideas like making it easier to retrain, to move where the jobs are, to start a business, or to decouple basic security from a single employer. Yet serious mobility reforms keep dying in the gears of American politics. They are buried in committees, vetoed by procedure, or shrunk down to one-time checks and symbolic gestures.
The blockage is not just about budget lines or a lack of moral willpower. It reflects a deeper mismatch between the world we live in and the machinery we are trying to run it with. Our policies and political institutions were largely designed for a more linear, stable economy: one where people held a handful of jobs in a lifetime, where local markets were less exposed to global shocks, and where “moving up” could be imagined as a sequence of steps inside one firm or one industry. Today’s economy, by contrast, is a networked web of constant churn—automation reshaping tasks, platforms rearranging entire sectors, and people moving more frequently across work, geography, and even legal status. The structure of opportunity has changed; our operating system has not.
This essay starts from the claim that America’s mobility crisis is partly a conceptual error. We continue to picture opportunity as a single ladder: you get on near the bottom, you climb steadily upward, and the main task of policy is to make sure the ladder is sturdy and the rungs are not too far apart. In a high-churn, tech-driven, high-immigration economy, that picture is badly outdated. People do not climb one ladder; they navigate a shifting lattice of short-term jobs, credentials, moves, and risks. Some have many paths open to them. Others face dead ends at every turn.
What we need, I argue, is a mobility state designed for that lattice world. Instead of scattering support across a thicket of narrowly targeted programs, a mobility state would build portable tools, flexible supports, and fast on-ramps that people can use as they move. It would treat public spending as opportunity infrastructure—helping people adapt, relocate, retrain, and start new ventures—rather than as a patchwork of last-resort cushions. Framed this way, mobility policy is not “welfare” in the traditional sense; it is the set of public tools that makes a dynamic society livable and a dynamic economy politically sustainable.
The promise of such a model is twofold. Economically, it can narrow the gap not just in incomes, but in agency—the ability to respond to shocks and seize chances instead of being permanently one disruption away from disaster. Politically, it can break through some of the gridlock that has killed past reforms by presenting itself not as a partisan wishlist, but as a shared investment in fair play: a toolkit that a conservative can defend as pro-work and pro-dynamism, and a progressive can defend as pro-fairness and anti-rigging.
The pages that follow try to make that case. First, I sketch how inequality in today’s America is as much about resilience to churn as it is about static gaps in wealth and income. Then I explain why obvious mobility fixes keep failing in our veto-heavy, fragmented political system. From there, I outline what a mobility state might look like in practice and why its tools could attract support from people who disagree on almost everything else. The goal is not to design a perfect blueprint, but to offer a different way of thinking about the problem: one that equips workers, newcomers, and strivers to navigate a world of relentless transition—without asking America to stop being what it has always been at its best: open, noisy, and in motion.
When people talk about inequality in the United States, they often picture a simple graph: the rich getting richer, the poor falling behind, the middle squeezed in between. That story is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The new inequality is not just about distance along a vertical axis. It is also about who has the tools, the buffers, and the room to maneuver in an economy defined by constant churn. It is about resilience as much as it is about income.
Start with the most visible layer: wealth. In recent decades, the top slices of the distribution have pulled far away from everyone else, not only in pay but in assets. Housing in thriving regions, stock ownership, and other forms of capital have appreciated dramatically, while many wages have barely kept pace with the basics. The result is that the rungs of the ladder have not simply grown farther apart; they have been nailed to property values, stock indices, and access to credit.
For households that own appreciating assets, this is a wind at their backs. Their balance sheets improve even when their salaries do not. For households that do not, the same forces show up as locked doors: neighborhoods they cannot afford to enter, schools they cannot move near, and investment opportunities that never arrive. The top slices of the distribution now own most of the ladders—and more of the ground they are built on.
Unsurprisingly, studies of intergenerational mobility now routinely rank the United States below many of its rich peers—especially the Nordic countries—on the odds that a child born near the bottom can make it into the middle. The gap is no longer just in where people end up, but in how many realistic paths they have to get there.
Beneath those numbers sits something harder to chart but easier to feel: a crisis of agency and morale. For many workers, paychecks are unpredictable, schedules are volatile, and the cost of missing a step has gone up. Wages in many sectors feel shaky even as housing, healthcare, childcare, and education become more expensive. Young people look at the entry costs of adulthood—tuition, rent, down payments—and conclude, reasonably, that what their parents called “starting out” now requires a level of capital that many will never accumulate.
Technology and automation have amplified this sense of precarity. Software and machines have eliminated some jobs outright and quietly hollowed out tasks inside many others. Entire occupations can now shift, shrink, or relocate as new tools arrive. For those with in-demand skills and strong networks, this churn can be a source of opportunity: new roles, remote work, fresh niches. For those on shakier ground, it means a constant risk of skill obsolescence and geographic dislocation. The job you trained for may not exist where you live; the job that does exist may not pay enough to survive.
Platform and gig work illustrate the pattern. They promise flexibility, and for some people they deliver it. But they also push risk downward: income fluctuates, benefits vanish, and the responsibility for smoothing volatility falls on the individual worker. Remote work, meanwhile, has made it easier for some to bargain for better lives across locations—while further pricing out others from the regions where high-wage employers cluster. Flexibility without security is just precarious freedom.
In a high-immigration, high-mobility society, this churn can easily be misread as a simple story of “newcomers versus natives.” When competition intensifies for stable opportunity slots—union jobs that still exist, seats in good schools, housing in opportunity-rich metros—it can feel, from the ground, as if one group’s gain must be another’s loss. But the deeper problem is not that newcomers arrive; it is that the system for allocating access to skills, credentials, and locations has not been updated for a world where movement is constant. Licensing barriers, credential mismatches, and housing bottlenecks ensure that the benefits of churn are unevenly distributed and the burdens fall heavily on those with the fewest resources to adapt.
This is why it is useful to distinguish between two kinds of inequality. Income inequality is about who gets what slice of current output. Opportunity inequality is about who has reliable access to the tools that let you survive and benefit from churn: education that maps onto real jobs, the ability to move where work is, the capital to start something new, the networks that open doors rather than close them. The first can be captured in numbers; the second often shows up as a difference in how people answer a simpler question: “If something goes wrong, do I have options?”
Seen in that light, the new inequality is as much about volatility as it is about distance. We have not just made the game harder; we have made the rules more volatile while keeping the safety gear scarce. A layoff that a well-connected professional experiences as an unpleasant detour can hit someone without assets or credentials as a near-permanent exit from the formal economy. The same technological and economic shifts that create opportunities for some have become trapdoors for others.
On top of all this sits the political layer: the way concentrated wealth translates into concentrated power. As assets have pooled at the top, so have the resources to shape the rules. Through campaign donations, lobbying, and the quiet work of regulatory influence, those who benefit from the current configuration of markets have gained outsized say over how those markets are governed. Neutral-sounding procedures—zoning codes, licensing boards, tax provisions, regulatory standards—can be tilted, slowly and subtly, in ways that protect incumbents.
The effect is not usually a cartoon conspiracy. It is a steady pattern in which policy protects existing winners rather than enabling new entrants. Restrictive land-use rules make it harder to build housing where people most want to live and work. Complex licensing regimes lock would-be competitors out of professions. Financial regulations are adjusted at the margins in ways that favor large, established players. Over time, the rules of the game start to look less like open competition and more like a moat.
Put together, these layers—asset-driven inequality, churn without safety, and policy that tends to favor incumbency—produce a particular kind of unfairness. The American game is supposed to be hard but fair. It is increasingly hard, rigged, and played on a field that keeps shifting under everyone except those already anchored at the top. The problem is not only that some people have more; it is that some people have room to absorb shocks while others live permanently one disruption away from ruin.
This is the landscape a mobility state would have to confront. The central divide is no longer just between rich and poor in a static sense, but between those who can navigate a turbulent economy and those who are permanently exposed to it. Inequality today is a gap in resilience to churn as much as it is a gap in income. Our current institutions—built for a slower, more linear era—were not designed to close that gap. The next step is to ask why, even when we recognize that, obvious mobility repairs keep failing in practice. That is where we turn next.
If the problem were only that we lacked good ideas, the American mobility story would look very different. Across the spectrum, policymakers and thinkers have spent decades proposing straightforward ways to make it easier to move, retrain, start businesses, or decouple basic security from a single employer. Many of these ideas poll well. Some even enjoy majority support across party lines. And yet, when the dust settles, what usually survives are pilot programs, one-time checks, or narrow fixes that leave the basic landscape unchanged.
Understanding why requires looking beyond economics into the machinery of American politics and the stories we tell about ourselves. Mobility reforms keep failing not because Americans are secretly hostile to mobility, but because our structures, our culture, and our partisan narratives are all wired in ways that make ambitious, coordinated change unusually fragile.
The first layer is built into the architecture of the system itself. The United States is a veto-heavy polity. Any significant reform has to survive a gauntlet of potential blockers: the Senate filibuster, bicameral approval, presidential veto, courts willing to reinterpret or delay implementation, and state governments that can resist or undermine federal initiatives. Even widely popular ideas can die quietly, not in a dramatic floor vote, but in committee, in rulemaking, or in the budgetary equivalent of a shrug.
On top of that sits fragmented federalism. The policy domains that matter most for mobility—education, housing, labor regulation, professional licensing—are split across federal, state, and local authorities. One level can push in one direction while another pulls in the opposite. City zoning can undercut state housing efforts; state licensing boards can nullify federal investments in training; school funding tied to local property taxes can blunt national attempts to expand opportunity. No single actor can “fix mobility.” Any serious effort has to pass through many hands, each with its own incentives, interests, and constraints.
As wealth has concentrated, these structural features have become easier for entrenched interests to exploit. Those most threatened by genuine mobility reform—incumbent asset holders, protected sectors, firms that benefit from tight labor markets or restricted competition—have more resources to shape how those veto points are used. Regulatory capture rarely announces itself; it appears as technical adjustments, advisory panels, and “stakeholder input” that consistently tilts outcomes toward those already inside the system. Neutral procedures become, over time, effective shields for incumbents.
A glance at other countries can make the American pattern clearer. Estonia, for instance, has used a highly integrated digital state to knit together services, credentials, and data across agencies. Citizens interact with government through a unified infrastructure; records move instead of people; updating how systems work can, in some cases, be done centrally. The point is not that the United States should try to become Estonia writ large. It is that a coordinated, coherent state can lower the friction of reform. By contrast, American mobility policy runs through a patchwork of legacy systems and overlapping jurisdictions that multiply friction by design. Even modest changes have to navigate that maze.
In a context where structures are this fragmented and veto points this abundant, the default outcome is stasis. Ambitious mobility reforms are not just difficult; they are fragile at every step—from drafting to implementation. That fragility shapes what politicians are willing to attempt, and it amplifies the power of those most invested in preserving the status quo.
The United States has a long tradition of skepticism toward big, abstract government. People will often support concrete, visible programs they can recognize—a GI Bill that pays tuition, a check that arrives in the mail, disaster relief that rebuilds a bridge—but grow uneasy when proposals sound like open-ended expansions of bureaucracy. “Big welfare” conjures fears of dependency and waste; “big tax” evokes fears of confiscation and punishment. The same citizen who likes a specific benefit may recoil when it is described in general ideological terms.
Overlaying that skepticism is a powerful meritocratic story. Many Americans still hold, at least aspirationally, to the belief that broad mobility already exists: that hard work and talent are, if not perfectly rewarded, still the main drivers of success. In that frame, critiques of how markets are organized or how opportunity is distributed can sound like attacks on effort, virtue, or personal responsibility. If the system is rigged, what happens to the pride people take in having navigated it successfully?
This creates a paradox. The very people who are most exposed to economic churn and most in need of better mobility tools may also be the ones most sensitive to being portrayed as victims of structure. They want help climbing, but they do not want to be told that the climb is impossible without a complete overhaul of the system they have been taught to respect. Any reform language that sounds like a moral rebuke of their culture or their choices risks producing backlash instead of support.
On top of structures and culture sits the thick fog of partisan narrative. Here, the obstacles are less about what policies do in practice and more about how they are labeled and by whom.
On the left, mobility repair is often framed in the language of justice and redistribution: rectifying historical wrongs, redistributing resources, expanding the welfare state. This speaks powerfully to people who see inequality primarily as a moral failure, but in a broader electorate it is easily coded as “welfare expansion,” especially when proposals are complex or technocratic. For someone already anxious about making ends meet, it can sound less like an offer of tools and more like a lecture about guilt and obligation.
On the right, most new social spending is quickly cast as “welfare,” “handouts,” or “socialism,” regardless of whether the underlying policy works more like investment or risk-sharing. Yet the same coalition fiercely defends large, popular entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits—and has shown sporadic enthusiasm for ad-hoc cash populism when it comes packaged in the right partisan brand. The dividing line is not the presence of state support; it is how that support is described and to whom it is seen as flowing.
Caught between these elite narratives are voters who, by and large, are less ideological than the parties that speak for them. What most people want is not an abstract model of justice or a perfectly consistent theory of markets. They want a fair shot and a working ladder: a sense that if they act responsibly and work hard, they will have a real chance to move up and enough security not to be destroyed by a single misstep. Instead, they are invited to pick sides in symbolic fights over labels—socialism versus capitalism, big government versus small government—that have only a loose connection to the practical question of whether they can afford a home, switch careers, or absorb a layoff.
By the time an idea has threaded its way through the system, it is either dead, diluted to a gesture, or branded in ways that half the country feels obliged to oppose. The problem, in other words, is not that Americans reject mobility reform in principle. It is that our institutions and narratives are wired to kill it, mislabel it, or shrink it down to something that cannot touch the underlying structure.
Any serious attempt to build a mobility state will have to start by recognizing that reality and designing around it, not wishing it away.
If the old mobility bargain is broken and the usual fixes keep jamming in the gears, it is not enough to call for “more programs” or “more market.” The point of a mobility state is not to stack new layers on top of the existing patchwork, but to rethink what public support is for in a dynamic society—and to do it in a way that can actually survive American politics.
One way to see the distinction is to place the mobility state beside two more familiar models.
At one pole is the protection state. This is the classic European social-democratic vision: a robust welfare architecture that buffers people from risk inside a relatively stable, homogeneous order. Jobs are more protected, unions are stronger, and the state guarantees generous floors in exchange for high taxes and tight regulation. The promise is stability. This model tends to work best in societies with high social trust and slow demographic change, where voters can imagine the typical recipient of benefits as someone much like themselves.
At the other pole is the minimal state. Here, security is treated mostly as a private matter. The state’s job is to enforce contracts, protect property, keep taxes low, and otherwise stay out of the way. Markets, not public institutions, are supposed to allocate opportunity. Risk is something individuals and families are expected to manage on their own, through savings, insurance, and private networks. In its pure form, this model sees most social policy as distortion, and most cushions as moral hazard.
The United States has borrowed pieces from both models, but it fits cleanly into neither. Its scale, diversity, and restless internal mobility make the protection state hard to sustain; its concentration of wealth and institutional barriers make the minimal state look, for many, less like freedom and more like exposure. A mobility state starts from that discomfort and tries to build something that matches the country as it is.
The core idea is simple: treat public spending as opportunity infrastructure in a high-churn world. Instead of using the state primarily to lock in stability—guaranteeing the same job, the same role, the same status—it would use policy to help people move through change: to shift sectors, retrain, relocate, start firms, and integrate quickly when they arrive in a new place. The tools would be:
If the old metaphor was a single ladder, the mobility state would build a lattice of supports that people can grab onto from many angles as they move.
For that vision to be more than an attractive sketch, it needs design principles that answer not only to economic logic but also to American political reality. Five stand out.
Programs have to be easy to explain and easy to use. The country is already littered with small, opaque schemes that require a lawyer, an accountant, or a social worker to navigate. A mobility state would favor one or two clear levers over a maze of narrowly targeted interventions. “Here is your opportunity account; here is what you can use it for” will always beat a forty-page eligibility pamphlet. Simplicity is not just good administration; it is a political shield. Voters are more likely to defend what they understand.
In a mobile society, tying basic security to a single employer, county, or state is a recipe for paralysis. A mobility state would make benefits follow the person. Health coverage, training supports, and core protections would attach to individuals, not job slots. That makes it less punishing to switch employers, move regions, or take the risk of starting something new. It also aligns with a deeply American intuition: support the worker, not the firm.
The emphasis should be on movement and agency rather than on permanent dependency. The promise is not “we will protect you from all change,” but “we will give you the tools to navigate change without being destroyed by it.” That means programs structured around growth, transition, and skill acquisition, not open-ended income replacement where exit ramps are unclear. Floors still matter, but in a mobility state the floor is a launchpad, not a holding pen.
Nothing poisons American social policy faster than visible us–them lines. When benefits are perceived as belonging to a narrow group, they are easy to stigmatize and easy to attack. A mobility state would push in the opposite direction: tools that are broadly available, even if generosity scales with need. That might mean universal eligibility with progressive top-ups, or benefits that everyone can access at certain life stages. The point is to make people feel like participants in a shared system, not outsiders watching someone else’s deal.
One of the deepest anxieties about new programs is that they will grow without limit. To answer that, a mobility state would favor supports that are explicitly tied to transitions or milestones: periods of retraining, relocations, early-childhood windows, entry into the labor market, or major shocks like plant closures. Benefits would be time-bounded or triggered by clearly defined events, more like the GI Bill than like an indefinitely expanding entitlement. This makes it easier for skeptics to accept new tools as targeted investments rather than as a blank check.
Taken together, these principles amount to a political bet. If you design mobility tools this way, you give different factions honest reasons to support them. A Republican can defend them as pro-work, pro-opportunity, and pro-dynamism: they help people stand on their own feet in a competitive economy and reduce the drag of employer-tied benefits on small business. A Democrat can defend them as pro-fairness, pro-floor, and anti-rigging: they spread access to capital, training, and mobility that are currently hoarded at the top and blunt the worst effects of churn on those with the least margin for error.
A mobility state, in other words, is not a compromise in the sense of splitting the difference between left and right. It is a reframing of what the state is for in a dynamic society. Instead of arguing endlessly about how big the cushion should be under a static order, it asks how to build public tools that make relentless motion survivable—and even empowering—for people who do not start at the top. The next question is what those tools might look like in practice. That is the work of the next section.
Design principles matter, but at some point the reader needs to see what any of this would look like in practice. A mobility state is not a single law or a master blueprint; it is a family of tools that treat people as mobile economic actors rather than as static occupants of fixed roles. What follows is a set of sketches—ways of showing how policy can be aimed at mobility rather than stasis, and how those tools can be framed as opportunity engines rather than as another round of “welfare expansion.”
Imagine that instead of structuring most support around emergencies and deficits, the country started by giving everyone a small but durable stake in their own mobility. A universal opportunity account would be one way to do that.
Every citizen—and, in a more ambitious model, every long-term resident—would receive an account seeded early in life and topped up modestly over time. The balance would not be for everyday consumption. It would be reserved for investments that change a person’s trajectory: education or retraining, relocation to a region with better prospects, starting a small business, paying for credential recognition, acquiring tools or equipment that make new work possible.
Used this way, public spending stops being only a cushion against free fall and becomes a reservoir of launch energy. Over time, the existence of such accounts would narrow the gap in tools, not just in transfers. Today, the line between “those who can take a risk” and “those who cannot” often maps onto who has family wealth to fall back on, who owns a home that can be borrowed against, who can afford to move for a job or to float a few months of low income while a project gets off the ground. Opportunity accounts would not erase those differences, but they would give people outside the asset-owning class some of the same options.
Politically, the idea lends itself to different, honest framings. On the right, it can be defended as a form of “capitalism for everyone” or “stakeholder capitalism”: broadening access to capital so that more people can start firms, invest in skills, and participate fully in markets. On the left, it can be framed as “shared inheritance” or “democratizing capital”: using public resources to open up pathways that have been informally reserved for those born into wealth. The underlying move is the same: shift some power from accumulated balance sheets at the top toward diffuse, individually directed capacity at the bottom and middle.
A central assumption of the mid-twentieth-century social contract was that a job was a relatively stable anchor. Health insurance, retirement savings, and other benefits were therefore bolted to the employer–employee relationship. In a high-churn economy, that architecture becomes a trap. The fear of losing benefits can keep people in bad jobs, deter them from moving to new regions, and punish anyone who tries to build a livelihood outside the traditional employer model.
A mobility state would flip that logic. Basic healthcare and core benefits would attach to the person, not the job. Employers might still contribute, but their role would be as one of several funding streams flowing into an individual’s portable benefit package. Lose or change your job, and the coverage moves with you. Shift from salaried work to self-employment or gig work, and you do not have to rebuild your security from scratch.
From a mobility perspective, the advantages are obvious. It becomes less risky to switch sectors, experiment with self-employment, or take time to retrain. People can treat jobs as stages in a journey rather than as precarious lifelines that cannot be jeopardized. In a society where internal migration and sectoral churn are likely to remain high, that flexibility is not a luxury; it is what makes motion survivable.
Here again, the framing matters. On the right, portable benefits can be presented as pro-entrepreneurship and pro-small business: they remove a major administrative burden from employers and make it easier to hire. On the left, they can be defended as extensions of coverage and reductions in precarity: a way to ensure that basic security does not depend on pleasing a particular boss or staying in a particular kind of role. The same institutional change speaks different moral languages without changing what it does.
The original GI Bill remains one of the clearest examples of what mobility-oriented policy can do when it is simple, generous, and time-bounded. It took a group of people at a natural transition point—returning veterans—and gave them portable, individually directed tools: tuition, living stipends, home loans. The result was not just relief; it was an explosion of upward mobility, new businesses, and expanded middle-class life.
A mobility state would update that logic for a churn economy. Instead of tying such tools only to military service, a modern GI-Bill-style program would focus on major economic transitions that large numbers of people routinely face:
The tools would be familiar: tuition vouchers for accredited programs, stipends to make full-time retraining financially survivable, relocation assistance for moves to regions with better prospects, and perhaps seed grants for starting small enterprises in under-served areas. The key is not to micromanage outcomes, but to give people enough support and flexibility to move from one viable footing to another.
The political message writes itself: “We don’t promise you your old job forever; we promise you a real path into your next one.” For those on the right, this is preferable to trying to freeze industries in place through protectionism or subsidies; it accepts economic change while refusing to abandon the workers affected by it. For those on the left, it is a concrete way to prevent technological and global shifts from producing permanent classes of the discarded. It is a bet that the state’s role in a dynamic economy is not to halt churn, but to ensure that people are not crushed by it.
No discussion of opportunity can ignore geography. In the contemporary United States, access to good schools, strong labor markets, and dense networks of opportunity is often physically gated by housing costs and land-use rules. High-opportunity metros—those with dynamic job markets and rich civic infrastructure—are frequently locked behind a mix of scarcity and regulation that keeps prices high and newcomers out. This is not a side issue; it is one of the main ways the mobility ladder is pulled up.
A mobility state would treat housing not only as shelter but as a mobility platform. That could mean several complementary tools. “Mobility vouchers” could help low- and middle-income households move from opportunity-poor regions to areas with better prospects, covering the real costs of relocation rather than assuming that people can simply absorb them. Down-payment support, targeted at first-time buyers in high-opportunity areas, could give people who have stable incomes but no family wealth a way to buy into the asset side of the economy rather than remaining permanent renters at the margins.
On the supply side, the state could lean on zoning incentives and infrastructure funding to reward jurisdictions that build more housing where demand is strongest, rather than effectively subsidizing exclusion. The goal is not social engineering in the caricatured sense; it is to remove artificial bottlenecks that trap opportunity behind walls of scarcity and regulation.
Again, the political language can be honest and plural. To conservatives, housing mobility tools can be framed as support for ownership, family formation, and the ability to move toward work instead of away from it. To progressives, the same tools can be presented as ways of attacking spatial inequality and de-facto segregation—opening up access to neighborhoods and schools that wealth alone currently guards.
Across all of these sketches, the underlying pattern is the same. None of these policies promise equal outcomes. They do something both more modest and more radical: they try to equalize access to the means of adaptation—capital, skills, security, and geography—in a world where churn is a permanent condition. They treat mobility as something to be built and maintained, not as a happy accident of earlier eras.
The details would matter, of course. How generous the accounts are, how portable the benefits, how targeted the housing tools—all of that would be the stuff of political argument. But the point of the mobility state frame is that those arguments happen inside a shared commitment: the state’s job, in a dynamic, diverse, high-immigration society, is not to promise stillness, but to give as many people as possible a real chance to move.
At this point, the natural objection is simple: even if all of this sounds reasonable on paper, why would it fare any better than the dozens of reform ideas that have already died in the gears of American politics? A mobility state cannot just be morally attractive or economically coherent; it has to be engineered for the country’s veto-heavy, deeply polarized system. None of what follows guarantees success in that environment; it only describes how to make success less improbable. The case for its plausibility rests on three features: how it can be built, how it can be framed, and who it brings into the same tent.
The first design choice is structural: mobility tools do not have to arrive as one grand package. In a system with a filibuster, divided government, strong courts, and powerful states, “comprehensive reform” is almost an invitation to gridlock. A mobility state can grow modularly. Universal opportunity accounts can be piloted at the state level or for certain age cohorts. Portable benefits can start with health coverage in specific sectors. A modern GI Bill can launch as a targeted program for displaced workers in particular regions. Housing mobility tools can roll out through federal–local partnerships in metros that want them.
That modularity is not a bug; it is what makes experimentation possible. Each policy can be judged on its own merits, tailored to local conditions, and adjusted without sinking the whole ship. A country that struggles to pass and maintain large, sweeping initiatives often does better iterating from smaller proofs of concept. A mobility state strategy leans into that reality instead of pretending it does not exist.
The same logic applies to federalism. Education, housing, licensing, and labor markets are already governed by overlapping layers of authority. Rather than trying to bulldoze that structure, a mobility state would treat states and cities as co-authors. Federal tools—funding for opportunity accounts, standards for portability, matching support for GI-Bill-style programs—can be paired with state-level choices about implementation. Blue states can emphasize one mix of tools; red states another. The point is to share a direction, not a single uniform script.
Finally, a pilot-and-scale approach allows the politics to follow the results instead of the other way around. If a particular configuration of opportunity accounts and portable benefits produces visible gains in mobility and business formation in one state, it becomes harder to caricature in another. Evidence does not dissolve ideology, and organized interests will still try to spin or smother uncomfortable examples, but it can change what is politically safe to support. In a veto-point-heavy system, that matters.
Structure alone is not enough. How mobility tools are talked about will determine whether they get coded as one more front in the endless war over “welfare” and “socialism,” or as something that sits in a different category altogether.
The most important shift is from welfare framing to opportunity framing. If programs are described primarily in terms of need—who qualifies based on hardship—they will be slotted into the familiar moral arguments about deservedness and dependency. If they are described primarily as tools—accounts, benefits, and supports that people can use to move through a changing economy—they tap into a different set of instincts: agency, effort, ambition. The line “we are not protecting you from the world; we are equipping you to move in it” is not just rhetoric; it signals a different underlying philosophy.
The second framing choice is to present a mobility state as restoration rather than revolution. Most people do not wake up wanting to join a debate about capitalism’s metaphysical structure. They want the basic American deal they thought existed: if you work, learn, and take reasonable risks, you should have a real chance to move up. Mobility tools can be presented as repairs to that deal, not as the birth of a wholly new one. “This is about making earning your way up possible again” is a sentence that can be spoken, with a straight face, from podiums in very different districts.
Because the tools are genuinely dual-use, they can also be described in the moral languages of both major coalitions. The right can emphasize unlocking human capital, reducing deadweight, encouraging entrepreneurship, and freeing people from employer-tied chains. The left can emphasize tackling structural barriers, widening the on-ramp to the middle class, and weakening the grip of inherited advantage. Neither side has to pretend to share the other’s full worldview to find their own real reasons to support the same instruments.
Even so, in a media ecosystem built for outrage and team sports, any framing can be dragged back into the old trenches. The aim is not to escape polarization entirely, but to give reformers a vocabulary that makes it harder to caricature every mobility tool as either “welfare creep” or “neoliberal austerity in disguise.”
The third feature is where the coalition-building happens. Much of recent American politics has been organized around identity labels and symbolic battles. A mobility state invites a different axis: outcomes. Instead of starting from “who deserves help,” it starts from “who is getting stuck, and how do we unstick them.”
The constituencies are already visible. Young people who did everything “right” and still find themselves priced out of housing. Older workers whose industries are being automated or offshored faster than they can retrain. Immigrants whose skills are frozen behind credential barriers. Small-town business owners who cannot compete with firms that can offer richer benefit packages or who are trapped in regions with shrinking demand. None of these groups map cleanly onto a single party or ideology. All of them are living different versions of the same story: high churn, thin safety gear.
A mobility-state politics would try to organize around those shared frustrations. The debate would shift from abstract moral accusations—who is lazy, who is privileged, who is “deserving”—toward concrete questions: Does this tool make it easier for people to move up? Does it reduce the power of incumbents to block new entrants? Does it widen or narrow the gap in resilience to economic shocks? Those are functional tests, not tribal ones.
That does not mean identity disappears; people will still bring their histories and loyalties into every argument. And negative partisanship—the instinct to oppose whatever “the other side” seems to favor—will still be a powerful drag on coalition-building. But shifting the focal point of the conversation matters. Instead of asking whether one side’s vision should defeat the other’s, a mobility state asks whether the ladder—in all its modern, networked complexity—is working at all. If the answer is no, there is room for an unusual kind of alliance: one that runs not along the usual left–right line, but between those who benefit from a rigged, low-mobility equilibrium and those who would gain from a fairer, more fluid game.
If such an alliance seems unlikely, it is worth remembering that American politics has generated stranger coalitions before—and that most of them looked implausible until they existed. None of this guarantees a governing majority for mobility. At minimum, a mobility state gives people something different to argue about: not whether the country should be a protection state or a minimal state, but whether it is willing to invest in mobility as a shared public project. In a system as jammed as the current one, that shift alone would be progress.
If a mobility state is going to be more than a thought experiment, it has to survive serious cross-examination. Different political traditions will approach these ideas with different suspicions, and some of those suspicions are healthy. They guard against real risks: drift toward technocratic neoliberalism, quiet bureaucratic creep, or the slow expansion of a managerial state that mistakes itself for the whole of society.
This section does not try to talk anyone out of their priors. It takes the main critiques seriously and asks whether a mobility state can be designed in ways that answer the core concerns without abandoning its purpose.
The first critique comes from the egalitarian left: isn’t this just neoliberalism with better branding? On this view, a mobility state sounds like a politics that accepts markets as the unquestioned backdrop and limits itself to greasing the gears—helping people adapt to a system that remains fundamentally tilted toward capital. Where, the critic asks, are the stronger guarantees, the expansion of public provision, the hard constraints on concentrations of wealth and power?
First, it does not reject floors. A decent society needs guarantees: basic income support, protections against destitution, healthcare that does not disappear with a job. A mobility state argues that those floors are necessary, but not sufficient. The floor cannot be the ceiling. If public policy stops at keeping people from falling, it leaves untouched the mechanisms that decide who gets to climb. Opportunity accounts, portable benefits, GI-Bill-style supports, and housing tools are all attempts to redistribute access to capital, skills, and movement, not just to add a marginal top-up to uneven paychecks.
Second, the project is explicitly anti-oligarchic. It takes as a starting point that today’s “free market” is heavily structured in favor of incumbents: through credential cartels, employer-tied benefits, land-use rules that lock up valuable geography, and regulatory systems that sophisticated players can navigate more easily than newcomers. Mobility tools are not neutral lubricants. They are aimed at weakening those chokepoints: lowering barriers to entry for new firms, making it easier to leave bad jobs, opening up access to high-opportunity regions, and giving people outside the asset-owning class some of the same strategic options that wealth now buys by default.
Third, a mobility state does not have to exclude more traditional egalitarian measures. There is nothing in the logic of opportunity accounts or portable benefits that forbids progressive taxation, stronger antitrust enforcement, or stricter rules on money in politics. The claim is not that opportunity tools replace all other forms of structural reform. It is that any serious attempt to tackle inequality in a high-churn economy needs a front end—how people get the means to move—not just a back end that corrects for outcomes after the fact.
For those on the left, the honest question is whether they see value in a strategy that reduces the power of wealth to lock out challengers, even if it does so in part by empowering individuals inside markets rather than shifting every function into public ownership. A mobility state can mitigate the “neoliberal gloss” risk if—and only if—it keeps floors robust, aims squarely at oligarchic chokepoints, and leaves room for classic egalitarian tools alongside mobility ones. It is not the whole egalitarian project; it is an attempt to ensure that more people have a credible way of shaping the settlement rather than being permanently shaped by it.
From the conservative or nationalist right, the suspicion runs in a different direction. Any new federal initiative looks like another step toward a larger, more intrusive state: more bureaucracy, more taxes, more drift toward a European-style welfare model that many conservatives distrust both culturally and fiscally. Skeptics in this camp worry that the rhetoric of “mobility” simply disguises an old ambition: to make government the central guarantor of social life.
Here, design matters as much as intent. Mobility-state programs can be constructed to look and behave very differently from classic open-ended entitlements. First, they can be simple, portable, and time-bounded. The GI Bill worked, in part, because it was legible: a set of benefits clearly tied to a period of service and a period of transition. People knew who qualified, what it covered, and roughly when it would end. Mobility tools can follow that pattern. Opportunity accounts can phase in gradually and have clear rules about use. GI-Bill-style supports for displaced workers or returning caregivers can be tied to specific events and durations. Housing mobility vouchers can be limited to first moves into high-opportunity areas or to first-time buyers.
Second, they can be framed—and genuinely designed—as pro-work, pro-family, pro-ownership. Portable benefits make it easier to start a small business, to move closer to extended family support, or to make career decisions based on long-term fit rather than on fear of losing health insurance. Housing tools that expand ownership and make it easier for young families to put down roots are culturally conservative in their effects, even if the instruments are novel.
Third, they can lean deliberately on federalism and local variation. A mobility state does not require a single national template. States and cities can choose which combinations of tools to emphasize, how generous to make them, and how to integrate them with existing institutions. That allows more culturally conservative jurisdictions to adopt versions that fit their own priorities—perhaps focusing more on entrepreneurship and family formation—while more progressive jurisdictions might lean harder into housing integration or public training programs. The federal role is to supply common rails and resources, not to script every detail.
Conservatives are right to be wary of bureaucracies that grow reflexively and of programs that quietly shift from targeted tools to permanent dependence. A mobility state that ignores those concerns will confirm them. One that treats restraint, clarity, and local experimentation as core virtues, rather than as concessions, has a stronger case to make: this is not about building a nanny state, but about giving people the means to stand more firmly on their own feet.
Put more sharply: a mobility state can mitigate the “big-state drift” risk if—and only if—it keeps programs legible, time-limited, and locally adaptable, and resists the temptation to turn every tool into a new, open-ended entitlement.
Libertarians and small-government skeptics share some of the right’s concerns but sharpen them in a different way. Even if the goals are attractive—more mobility, less oligarchy—they worry that using the state as the main lever risks:
They also tend to be more sensitive than most to the danger of policies that expand the range of life that must pass through official channels.
A mobility state can either confirm these fears or speak directly to them. First, the target is rigging, not markets themselves. Much of what is currently defended as “the free market” is, in practice, a dense thicket of privileges: licensing regimes that have little to do with safety, employer-tied benefits that trap people in jobs, zoning rules that artificially restrict housing supply, regulatory processes that only well-resourced incumbents can navigate. Mobility tools are meant to be unrigging tools. They lower the cost of exit from bad arrangements, widen entry into good ones, and reduce the dependence of opportunity on inherited wealth. In that sense, they increase the number of genuinely free actors.
Second, the unit of power in a mobility state is the individual, not the agency. Opportunity accounts are controlled by people, within broad rules, rather than allocated line-by-line by program officers. Portable benefits attach to individuals, who can carry them across employers and sectors. GI-Bill-style supports fund the person’s transition, not the budget of a particular institution. Housing mobility tools give households the means to choose where to live, instead of confining them to whatever is cheapest or closest.
Third, there can be guardrails against bureaucratic creep built in from the outset: simple eligibility rules, clear time limits, sunset and renewal clauses that require periodic re-authorization, and an emphasis on plural provision. Training vouchers, for example, can be used at a wide range of accredited providers, including private and nonprofit institutions, rather than channeled exclusively through a single state system. That keeps room for competition and experimentation instead of funneling everything through one bureaucracy.
A libertarian does not have to abandon skepticism to see something of value here. Many will still oppose new state-backed tools on principle, and libertarians are not a mass constituency. But their core concern—opposing concentrated power, whether public or private—is directly engaged. A mobility state that weakens oligarchic choke points should worry large, entrenched incumbents more than it worries small-government skeptics. It does not end the argument over how big the state should be. It shifts one front of that argument toward a question libertarians have always cared about: how many people actually have the capacity to exercise meaningful choice in their lives. A mobility state can mitigate the “statist ratchet” risk if—and only if—it keeps its focus on unrigging markets, empowering individuals, and hard-coding limits on bureaucratic sprawl.
The point of anticipating these critiques is not to claim that a mobility state will satisfy every camp. It will not. It is to show that the proposal is not naïve about the risks each tradition sees—and that, with care, those risks can be mitigated in the design, rather than dismissed in the rhetoric.
If a mobility state is going to be anything more than a thought experiment, it has to live inside the world of actually existing coalitions. That does not mean pretending that every camp will embrace it enthusiastically. It does mean asking a hard but practical question: is there enough in this framework that different traditions could support without feeling that they have just handed victory to their opponents?
The answer depends less on clever branding than on whether the core of the project speaks honestly to the values each camp claims to care about.
For Democrats and social democrats, the appeal is straightforward. A mobility state attacks structural barriers rather than lecturing individuals. Universal opportunity accounts, portable benefits, and housing mobility tools widen access to education, capital, and high-opportunity regions in ways that directly undercut the mechanisms of capital accumulation at the top. The frame is anti-oligarchy rather than anti-market: the aim is to make it harder for wealth to weld the ladder in place beneath it, not to punish success for its own sake. In that sense, this is a project of democratizing access to the tools of advancement, not just trimming the edges of income distributions.
For Republicans and conservatives, the attraction lies in a different register. The emphasis on work, responsibility, and ownership runs through every proposal. Opportunity accounts are not stipends for inactivity; they are tools that require initiative—choosing training, relocating, starting a business. Portable benefits reduce the burden on employers and make it easier to start a small firm or move to one that is a better fit. A modern GI Bill for economic transitions treats upheaval as something to be met with grit and preparation, not permanent protection. The use of state-level variation and pilots respects federalism and local control rather than assuming Washington has a single blueprint for every region.
For libertarians and small-government skeptics, the redeeming features are about power and structure. A mobility state decentralizes practical power downward: individuals control their accounts, choose providers, and decide when to move or retrain. Markets become more contestable as more people can afford to enter them. Barriers that currently protect incumbents—like employer-tied benefits and exclusionary zoning—are deliberately weakened. The interventions are rule-based, time-bounded, and designed to expand the range of feasible choices rather than to manage outcomes from above. That may not satisfy those who want the smallest possible state, but it does align with a core libertarian instinct: markets should be open, not rigged.
None of this requires bad faith. Each camp can recognize something of its own stated priorities in the design—fairness and de-rigging for the left, work and responsibility for conservatives, deconcentration of power for libertarians—even while disagreeing about other fronts of politics.
Libertarians are numerically small in American politics, but their role in this kind of project is less about vote totals and more about translation. Because they are suspicious of both big government and big business, they occupy a narrow but useful strip of conceptual ground: anti-oligarchy without automatic hostility to markets.
In that position, they can sometimes play a bridging role, especially in elite and intellectual debates. On the right, they can argue that mobility tools are pro-market and anti-capture: they make it harder for incumbents to lock up opportunity and easier for new actors to compete. On the left, they can demonstrate that not all market-friendly reforms are corporate wish lists—that it is possible to widen access to the market precisely in order to dilute concentrated economic power.
The point is not to romanticize libertarianism or to pretend that every libertarian will sign on. It is to recognize that a mobility state lives or dies on whether people can see it as unrigging rather than as quiet managerial expansion. A tradition that is already organized around the language of rigging, capture, and competition is well-placed to help make that distinction legible, even if its influence is felt more in arguments than in vote counts.
Beneath the partisan noise, most people do not experience their lives as arguments about abstract ideology. They experience them as a question: is the game fair enough that effort still matters?
A mobility state has a chance politically because it does not try to smuggle one side’s utopia past the other. It does not ask conservatives to abandon their attachment to work, family, and ownership, nor does it ask egalitarians to stop caring about structural barriers and oligarchic drift. Instead, it treats all of those concerns as different faces of the same underlying problem: a system that has let mobility wither while power has thickened at the top.
Framed that way, the project is less “left versus right” than “fair play versus rigging.” The promise is modest but radical: not equal destinations, not a guarantee against every shock, but a rebuilt set of rules in which the path upward is open to more than those who already start near the summit.
In a country that still tells itself a story about second chances and new beginnings, that may be the most realistic basis for a coalition: not agreement about everything, but a shared insistence that the climb itself should be real.
The easiest way to talk about what has gone wrong in the United States is to talk about inequality. The gaps are visible: in wealth, in housing, in education, in who can plan for the future and who is just trying to get through the month. But underneath those gaps sits something even more corrosive: a mobility problem. The trouble is not only that some people have more than others; it is that the path from “not much” to “enough” has grown narrower, steeper, and more fragile for anyone who is not already securely inside the winner’s circle.
It is not for lack of ideas. Over the last several decades, policymakers, academics, and activists have floated a long list of proposals to repair the ladder: better schools, cheaper college, training programs, wage subsidies, housing vouchers, tax credits. Many of these ideas poll well. Most of them die quietly. They are distorted by a political system full of veto points, refracted through narratives that turn any ambitious reform into either “socialism” or “cruel austerity,” and filtered through institutions built for a slower, more linear economy than the networked, high-churn world people actually inhabit.
The argument for a mobility state begins from that impasse. It takes seriously the structural constraints on both the economy and the politics. It accepts that the United States is not going to become a Scandinavian-style protection state, and that it is not going to give up on being a large, diverse, high-immigration society. It also refuses the fatalism that says nothing meaningful can be done. Instead, it asks what happens when a country designs its institutions around the reality it actually has: an open-port engine rather than a sheltered harbor.
In that frame, mobility is not a sentimental slogan. It is a design principle. Treat public spending as opportunity infrastructure and the priorities change. The question shifts from “How do we cushion people when the system throws them around?” to “How do we equip them with the tools—skills, capital, portability, information—to navigate that system on their own terms?” Universal opportunity accounts, portable benefits, a modern GI Bill for economic transitions, and housing mobility tools are not just technocratic tweaks. They are ways of putting real options in the hands of people who currently have very few: the renter locked out of homeownership, the mid-career worker facing automation, the caregiver trying to reenter the labor force, the immigrant whose skills vanish on paper at the border.
A mobility state is not a promise of equal outcomes. It does not try to script every life or guarantee anyone a particular rung. Its ambition is more limited and, in a way, more radical: to rebuild a fair game in which effort, talent, and luck can once again matter for people who are not already insulated by inherited security.
Seen that way, the real divide is not between left and right so much as between those who are comfortable with a world in which the path upward is reserved for the already secure and those who are not. For the latter, the choice is not between a bigger cushion or no cushion at all. It is between a politics that accepts drift toward oligarchy and one that tries, however imperfectly, to reopen the channels through which people can change their own position.
The point is not to promise everyone the same destination. It is to make sure that the climb itself is not a closed club. If the American idea is worth salvaging, it will not be by turning the country into something it has never been, but by taking seriously what it has always claimed to be: a place where new people, new starts, and new combinations are possible. That does not require a bigger cushion. It requires a fairer climb.
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