A tax system of the future. Volunteer based.
I want you to imagine a city of the future. One in which many of the the old services are still required.
Streets still require cleaning.
Recycling collections and trash collections are weekly.
Public transport is an important infrastructure.
New citizens require ID cards and help and advice.
Libraries are popular.
Parks are enjoyed by all.
Lets imagine that central banks have disappeared.
They collapsed after the great crypto-currency revolution.
Along with the banks went many of the government agencies due to financial collapse. The people cried out and the world was bleak, for a time.
Taxation is theft!! Some have said.
It is also a means to pay for public services.
What if we had a decentralised platform that everyone living in a city had access to and on that platform we could choose which portions of our earnings go towards certain services.
To make this simple lets start with a small settlement of 20 people.
Let's make a library, a hospital, a recycle centre, a town hall for ID processing, an emergency service, a public park, a metro system and a citizen advice centre.
All in all that's 8 public services. Each one requiring various amounts funding to operate.
For our settlement we will give people employment and make one or two of them soon to be unemployed. They will make use of the citizen advice centre when the unemployment time comes.
Every month the citizens of our settlement are expected to contribute an amount of their earnings towards the public services. Each citizen is shown a page of public services and a summary breakdown of what each one costs. Let's say the consensus among the folk of the town is that each will give 20% towards the public services.
The portal will become a means of distributing that 20% among the services the citizen desires. Each citizen will be able to see what each citizen has donated and each is able to see to what services his or her fellows have chosen to receive the bulk amount of their tax contribution.
We need to imagine an amount for every service per month, this is where we will have to be creative because I have no idea how much these things cost in the real world.
a. Hospital – 20k
b. Library - 10k
c. Recycles - 15k
d. town hall - 8k
e. Emergency Service - 12k
f. Public Park - 10k
g. Metro System - 30k
h. Advice centre - 8k
Total of 113'000 per month required
In this example I am going to just place every citizen in the same job and say they earn $50,000.
I know this is not how reality works but it makes it easier for the model. Feel free to take this work and get more complex. I just want to demonstrate an idea.
50000 * 0.2 = 10000
10000 * 20 = 200'000
In our small settlement we have a 200'000 budget per month. Yay.
The users of the tax platform would login and send their allocated 20% of earnings to the social portal and begin to choose which services they wish to contribute the most to. If one citizen thinks that the hospital is more important to them and that they think the parks are to flamboyant with their spending they can choose to give a bulk to the hospital. This makes paying taxes a democratic process. If some citizen thinks the police or emergency services are not getting enough funding they could make a notice and ask people to consider donating more to the emergency services.
I know this is only a simple model and in reality systems that run cities are much more complex. However I think with blockchain technology and platform's like Steem showing people a different way of distributing wealth and information maybe a system like this in the future is something that would be possible.
Please upvote and resteem so this idea can grow like a seed in the minds of many.
Also comments and discussion are such an important part of idea's like this.
Let me know your thoughts.
@originalworks
a must try system who knows the result 👍
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Sounds like a diversion of the idea behind the communism. It's perfect on paper but doesn't work in real world.
And the problem is not in the idea, it's the people.
It's good that you've given an example with a smaller population. In your case, the idea might be working properly for few generations.
But the problem is in our general drive to be aggressive and destructive. Our civilization is standing on these drives / as well as others of course /. In order to survive and create, we had to kill and destroy.
The idea destruction is not needed has emerged for like the past 100 years and I would say that we are not prepared for the world that you describe. Hence we might not even deserve one.
Of course this is my subjective opinion.
Thanks for your article. It's food for the thought :)
I don't advocate revolutions! I advocate evolution !
Enlightened Anarchy.
Thanks for your comment. I also agree that the people are the problem but for me the problem is that people can be so manipulated by the PR engine that entire generational cultures and social belief systems have been crafted by the ruling classes. The engineering of consent I think it's called. A great book I read on the current state of things is called "The global industrial complex" A collection of essays on the various parts of the machine. Highly recommend it.
Your model makes sense! And i think blockchain tech can be used to realize such system. Great! Thinking man!
Thank you man, I'm glad you too understand the potentials of blockchain technology. It seems a lot of people are yet to look past the "make money on cryptocoins" phase.
Lol! You're right though . . .
I know people who would abuse this and make full use of the services while never contributing anything towards it. That goes against my sense of fairness.
I'd prefer a pay-to-play model where people pay a fee to the community for the land they own. Landlords and overseas 'investors' (parasites would be a better term) who collect rent from people in the community or leave plots of land vacant while they wait for capital gains to accrue wouldn't get a free ride anymore.
The idea behind this is that using blockchain technology we could see those who do abuse the system and what amount they have paid. That was one of the problems I am trying to address.
Very interesting ideas @thesimpson however how would the people without jobs pay for the services in which they use? Would allocated cost be distributed to those capable of paying as such their percentage would go up? Much the same way our current take system works but in this model you’re effectively able to “allocate” your resources to those in which you use.
Those not working would attend the advice centre and receive a minimum stipend. From that theywould still have to pay the 20% tax, citizens could also see if the people claiming the unemployed stipend have ever actually contributed to the service.
I do see it as an improvement on how the tax system should currently work. Yes with payers able to allocate what their tax goes towards and also other citizens able to see in percentage form what other citizens have contributed.
Very deep and complex, great work!!
interesting post like it..
This post was resteemed by @steemvote and received a 45.53% Upvote
good post..
https://steemit.com/blog/@amazingarmaan/positive-vibes