Testing of weighted revenue-specified bill:

[oblique nexus]

Spam filter ate the long screenshot explanation: I'm proposing a test of a law that would generate desired revenue by assessing it proportionally based on desired factors; rather than try to figure out the correct amount, the test forces the total revenue desired to be 180e/hour, selected as approximately 10% of current tax revenue. As a protection against unexpected math, the tax for the test is hard-limited at 15e/hour, approximately the highest expected tax amount. As an emergency protective measure, the tax law will only run if a killswitch account has a 0 euro balance; this account is excluded from account protections, so in the event of some serious error, anyone can shut down the taxation portion of the law.

I'm seeking input and discussion about what the weighting factors should be for the apportionment, and also how to determine revenue goals on a mostly-automatic basis; towards the latter end, I've implemented government expense tracking, so that revenue goals can include spending.

I intent to submit the law shortly, then go to bed. Ideally the timing of when it passes will be where people familiar with it can have eyes on the outcomes, and right now I think I'm the only person familar with it. I'll answer questions and work on iterating in response to feedback.

[oblique nexus]

@neon hamlet @green talon @little vessel , your feedback is necessary.

[green talon]

Could you dum it down a bit, I don't really understand what is written.

[oblique nexus]

Sure. The final law defines a revenue amount, and then apportions that amount among players according to whichever factors are appropriate.

Each hour, for each player, an amount of their currency and of tracking is added to the weights account, which serves the same basic role as the tax payment account serves for the income tax. Unlike the income tax, it’s not the amount of the payment, but rather the relative contribution.

Separately, the desired amount of revenue is determined.

Each individual’s relative contribution is divided by the total contribution to get the fraction of the total tax that they pay, and then multiplied by the total amount needed to get the amount paid.

There’s a bit of careful math set up so to avoid having problems on the law trigger if it triggered for some citizens and then triggered for other citizens, or if for some reason one or more triggers were dropped. For testing purposes I also added some features to limit how bad an effect an error could possibly be.

[little vessel]

What will be the taxe rate ? Will the expanse take in consideration ? Is there some tax level according to the profits on a daily basis? Some player just put abusive price et got ridiculous amount of money and never spent it in other people shops. Last cycle too much monopole, break the cycle and create huge problems of money for the fed bank

A well balanced tax rate and some redistribution to small/poor active player could stimulate the global economy, and slow down the growth of monopole.

[oblique nexus]

I think the tax rate should be dynamically adjusted based on government spending and a desired float.

As for what is taken into consideration when determining weights, that can be literally anything. For the testing purposes I was using income-expenses, labor performed, and housing value. Other possibilities include total account balance, plots claimed, or literally any other number available to the law system. I was using housing value as a better proxy for wealth than account balance is, and I think it’s the hardest proxy for wealth to falsify.

There’s a simple switch to turn off the part of the law that does the actual taxes, so changes can be made to how the weights and amounts are calculated and see what the results are without any chance of accidentally trying to collect all of the taxes for the entire run in one hour.

[neon hamlet]

i have changed the draft a bit (the tax from euro to personal credit and the target account to # Tax evaluation)

with these changes we wont be dragged in front of a court for trying this tax out

since i did these changes the max can be removed imo

[little vessel]

Ok 👌🏼 I will look after work

[oblique nexus]

Those changes will be only a small impairment to the first parts of the test. Although if you're worried about court why are you opposed to fixing the rent deduction?

[neon hamlet]

can you tell me how those skills are equal? in my eyes they arent.

how much work each skill needs to perform to earn the same amount of money is vastly different.
Sure the higher rent skills have a large start up cost but that is partially born by the state through skill research.

An excavator will always have a higher profit than logs or lumber for example.
Therefore we are allowed and i feel obligated to discriminate between those skills.

[oblique nexus]

Do you think that people who have a particular profession or specialization should pay a higher tax burden, all other things being equal.

Put a different way: if someone gains a specialization and does literally nothing with it, should that change how much tax they pay? I’m a really tentative “maybe, probably not” on that.

[neon hamlet]

i can only assume that as soon as they put a star in that skill that they plan on working with that skill.

My assumptions can always be proven wrong but that would need a bigger sample size than a few people.

we dont always have data to work with and only our assumptions.
So yeah i think they should have a higher tax burden

[oblique nexus]

Huh. Based on my concept of equality, I feel that all other things being equal or correctly accounted for, having different specializations or number of specializations is not a significant difference, absent the presence of a specific law requiring eg that certain specializations cannot perform labor without a high enough nutrition and housing value.

[little vessel]

What about a kind of wealth taxes based on the number of claim chunk and vehicle placed, and or a consumption vat ( 1% on anything you buy maybe ) ? Also my pov it’s important to maintain the UBI and eventually thinking to increase a little bit the hourly amount to allow «small and moderate » active player to keep buying stuff in shop despite some excessive price

[oblique nexus]

Changes to the UBI would be a constitutional amendment.

[little vessel]

That’s not the priority, I concede. we will see this weekend and next week if the taxes program worked and bring back money to the fed account as pricy stuff is starting to be made 😉

[oblique nexus]

Also, the only problem that an increase to the UBI is likely to solve is one where people were having trouble pricing things low enough.

[oblique nexus]

<@&838128115259277392> Revision one of the law is up for vote. This revision corrects an error where an unavailable currency was expected, a new currency has been minted. Secondary to that, all weights were divided by 100 to prevent running out of that currency, and a one-time provision to transfer it is implemented. No euros are taxed in the current iteration, and all previous protections remain intact.

[oblique nexus]

Revision 2 corrects errors in changing the accounting currency, removes the one-time clause. No features differ.

[floral quail]

Maybe next time it needs to be revised, let's add something to the name that would make it more clear for the people that it's a test and doesn't actually tax anyone.

[oblique nexus]

New revision: Changes name as specified, fixes one additional currency assignment error, removes the 15 personal credit cap on testing, adjusts the evaluation account to show previous hour instead of accumulation, federal expenses determinations no longer include transfers between accounts.

[oblique nexus]

Revision FML: Found and fixed a new error where a wrong account caused core function to fail.

[oblique nexus]

Revision the next: Core functionality seems to be operating, incorporated taxfree income proposal, fixed a missing pair of parenthsis that was screwing up the weights, now using government expenses as the only predictor of future government needs. Still not causing any actual taxes. Please approve the new tests so I can figure out what else isn't working.

[floral quail]

Well I wanted to announce the voting results with bold formatting and a screenshot, but spam filter might've eaten it, so:

Revision approved, 3 for - 0 against - 2 abstained

[oblique nexus]

One more revision, somehow all of the accounting currency ended up in the wrong spot. Now nly attempts to tax players with money, and includes test chat commands to reset the accounts for testing.