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.
