On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 4:26 PM Kerim Aydin via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> > On 5/17/2020 10:38 PM, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion wrote: > > The Prime Minister's Budget Regulations may set the tax rate, R, > > a rational percentage value defaulting to 0%. The Registrar's Budget > > Regulations may set the personal withholding, W, an integer defaulting > to > > twice the number of coins in a welcome package. > > Thoughts: > > 1. Why aren't all these quantities switches - switches come with a lot of > built-in protections. I wanted the budgets themselves to be allowed to be determined as percentages, flat values, or formulas. For instance "The Agoran budget is 50 coins", "the Agoran budget is 25% of the General Fund", or "The Agoran budget is the greater of 50 coins and 25% of the General Fund". I could make the tax rate and the personal withholding switches, I guess, it just seems weird to treat some of the values differently than others, and I do want that flexibility for the budgets themselves. > > 2. If we're doing tax rates, proposing tax rates should be linked to > elections (taxes being of course the most ancient political issue there > is). We had an old mechanism for that (the old definition of "budgets") > though it's easy enough to write your own. Easy enough to add, though I'd still want them to be changeable between elections (the default modification threshold is 2 Agoran consent IIRC, high enough to stop a candidate from pulling a bait and switch). > > 3. This far too much mess to do monthly IMO, you'd barely sort out one > before it was time to do the next. Might I suggest quarterly? I don't understand why. I think the confusion here is possibly my use of the word "budget", which implies something that changes every time. That's not my vision for how this would play out. I'd think that the Budget Regulations wouldn't change much from month to month, only changing when the officer thought they needed to tweak something. As for the calculations, I definitely don't think doing those monthly is a problem. All of them are simple formulas applied to information the Treasuror tracks in eir weekly report. E's entirely capable of doing that, especially when e's being compensated with control of half the Agoran budget. Is there something I'm missing here? Or do you have a different vision for how this should play out? 4. Until we have a trading economy I'm opposed to taxes. Because if coin > wins are being treated as "high score" they shouldn't be taxed, because > accumulation is the whole point, and there's no game need to make sure the > rich and the poor are balanced. > I hadn't thought of this problem, but I find it quite persuasive. I won't actually propose this until something like sets is adopted. -Aris
