Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Since the amount of ISK in the game is going up incontrollably and the disparity between the poor and the rich keeps growing, I propose to add a progressive wealth tax, ranging from 1% to 3%.

The total wealth of a character or corporation should be calculated by taking all assets, ISK, structures and skillpoints into consideration, and then each month a wealth tax is levied.

For individuals or corporations that have under 100 million isk in net wealth, the tax is 1%.
Between 100 million and 1 billion isk, the tax is 2%.
More than 1 billion isk, the tax is 3%.

The tax is taken directly from the wallet. If the wallet does not have enough ISK, it goes into negative and the character should be prohibtied from transfering ISK or assets to someone else until the wallet is positive again.

You're basically punishing people who play infrequently compared to those who play more frequently. You're also rewarding the very wealthy because most of the very wealthy in the game will have a significant amount of their wealth tied up in the markets or other places where it's A. not easily calculated into your formula, and B. not in a taxable form.

Also 1B ISK is not very much and therefore makes a terrible starting point for the highest bracket in your tax.

Overall this is neither needed nor a particularly good idea. ISK should be taxed when it does something, not for simply sitting around, since ISK that's sitting around doing nothing isn't a problem.

The contrast that this works in RL, not in EVE because taxes in EVE get destroyed not put back into the society.

That aside, taxing 1B ISK? 1B ISK is nothing in the world of EVE. It buys you a single T3C or Faction BS with proper fitting. Real richness is beyond 100B and even this is nothing. While your tax would destroy immense sums of ISK from the really rich, it would in particular also destroy a lot of ISK from the the EVE citizens who barely have enough to have sustainable fun.

I disagree that a tax where the revenue is simply removed from the game is not providing a service.

I won't debate on the quality of the service (aka is it a good or stupid idea), but we all know about the current issue with isk faucets overflowing at the moment... soaking up some of that isk and removing it from the game would be one means of wiping out speculative inflation.

Sure the tax isn't being spent on something tangible, but the service provided in that taxation is the attempt at controlling inflation.

Assuming one were to go with a "tax the wealthy" approach, simply adding a 20% concord tax to any ratting ticks over 50m would very rapidly reduce the number of people ratting in titans and supers. Again, not debating the merit of the approach, merely the concept that it is not providing a service "in exchange".

If a government decides to devalue its currency, it funds the printing of more currency through the use of tax dollars. There is nothing tangibly gained (save for more currency floating around, which I would argue may as well be intangible), yet the service was provided.

Such a service could be used to improve the country's position within international trade, something China did (and possibly still does) for many years.

Just because you can't eat it, drive on it, etc, does not mean that it isn't a service being provided to the people for whom they are in governance of. A "service" loosely defined is any act for which work is done to help someone. Making their isk worth more on the market is most certainly helpful, and the act would be done by CCP implementing the tax.

Lol well, my first post correctly conveyed my feelings on the subject. I agree it's an utterly terrible idea... though 53 has certainly come up with worse. We kind of segued OT on the whole thing lol.

First of all, 1b is nothing, second, anyone keeping a lot of ISK in their wallets is doing it wrong. ISK is just like real money, if you hide it in the mattress it will only lose value, ISK has to be invested, and every wealthy player knows this. I have almost a trillion ISK in assets, and not even 5b on my wallet.

Besides, it would be very easy to dodge this system by simply moving assets and ISK to alts or corporate wallets. It would be just another broken system that doesn't do what it was intended to do, like bounties and wars.

Moreover, this is a economy centered game featuring capitalism on its most brutal form, so take your communist ideas the **** out of here.

1b is poor though, that's not even enough to Plex my account.

There are people with hundreds of billions if not trillions and multiple trillions and hundreds of trillions for the cancerous ghost trainers. Why should I get taxed because the exploited the same and broke the rules. Just ban them permanently and their isk is gone.