Tax-Subsidized Corporate Dependents as a Distributed Social Security Mechanism

This paper proposes a distributed social security mechanism in which firms receive tax relief proportional to the number of individuals whose basic living costs they continuously support. Rather than advocating welfare reduction or privatization, the framework reconfigures the bearer structure of minimum support from a single centralized payer to a competitive intermediate layer, while preserving an unconditional public safety net. The contribution is structural rather than prescriptive. The paper formalizes eligibility, portability, risk adjustment, auditability, and tax-incidence channels, and explicitly identifies dominant failure modes—including coercive lock-in, exclusion equilibria, audit infeasibility, fiscal drift, and market concentration. Crucially, it characterizes the conditions under which these failures are unavoidable, presenting qualitative impossibility and limit results rather than assuming that additional constraints always restore efficiency. By situating the mechanism at the intersection of welfare provision, firm behavior, tax incidence, and market power, the paper offers a design scaffold for evaluating when “competition over stability” can exist—and when it necessarily collapses into a market for control. The framework is intended to support subsequent calibration, simulation, and empirical testing, not to claim universal applicability or near-term implementability.