I'd love to see your thoughts about basic income.
http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/26/The-basics-of-Basic-Income/
Interesting read.
Thing is, over half of all money is thought to evade the tax system with corporate giants and the 1% barely paying any tax using offshore accounts etc, so if that could be captured it would double tax right away.
Add to that approximately half of US federal tax is spent on the military budget, most of which is not needed at all and has served to decrease national security by making the world more dangerous (making enemies).
Add to that subsidies to fossil fuel companies and other industries. Cut those and focus on environmental sustainability and energy independence through clean means, which doesn't poison the population and saves medial costs.
There are lots of ways to increase the government budget by making society genuinely richer. Preserve the environmental wealth, make good relations with other countries, increase tourism, cut the budget of the spy agencies, instead of sending people to war have them do something useful that brings a net positive result. These are just a few off the top of my head.
Basic income can be done using BitShares. Steps to do it:
- Use future VOTE features to identify unique individuals as BitShares citizens.
- Issue UIA token, registered citizens sign up to collect their token.
- BTS holders vote in at least 1 100% delegate who's pay goes to basic income for the citizens (or citizens could even vote on what they want to do with it in a direct democracy, but lets say here that it's evenly distributed as basic income to all BitShares citizens).
- BTS holders want more bitasset users, so they vote in dilution to pay for basic income to attract new users
- Citizens want more basic income (gov budget), so to increase their gov budget they use bitassets.
So new BTS would be created to pay for the basic income while at the same time BTS is locked up as bitasset collateral. As long as the citizens convert more money into bitassets than the inflation, which they would do to increase their basic income then it would keep working. The citizens wouldn't ever want to sell their basic income into something outside of BitShares as that would decrease their basic income by reducing their governments budget. So everyone is incentivised to stay entirely within BitShares. They have no taxes to pay yet receive basic income/direct democracy voting rights.
The problem is, who would by the inflationary backing asset (BTS)? Well, if the backing asset had other uses and income sources like BTS does along with stakeholder voting power to influence the direction company people would (and do already) buy it. Maybe BTS could be the voting token, instead of a UIA, to participate in the direct democracy as a citizen where you only need a fraction of a single BTS to vote.
It would be like a Google distributing a portion of their profits to their users, it builds a positive brand image, its marketing while serving humanity. Would shareholders ever vote for such a thing? I guess we'll find out. Once one company starts doing it others may compete to be the most friendly company.
This is just a rough idea... I'm not convinced (by my own ideas) that inflating the backing asset solves the problem long term, it could just be moving/hiding it. Even so it would be great marketing and a fascinating experiment.