Just decided to have a go at some Democracy 3 modding, and wondering how best to implement these 2 ideas. I’m fairly happy with what I want these to do, but being new to the modding side of things I thought I’d see if anyone fancied giving me some pointers etc.
Any thoughts as to how best to set these up?
I’d love to see this implemented, never modded though so can’t help you in that respect. IIRC the idea of NIT can be a bit more complicated than what you suggest. If it was as simple as making sure everyone had at least 10K then why would people work for 11K a year? In effect they only get 1k more but have to do far more work. You could argue that this is a good thing because it forces businesses to pay better wages. An alternative idea is to say that anyone earning less than 20K get’s an NIT of half the difference between their wage and 20K. So if you earn nothing you get 10K, if you earn 1K you get and extra 9.5K. This means that if people want to work part time or less for a little bit of extra cash they can do it without having to take a job that pays over 10k.
Also why do you think socialists would dislike this?? I’m a member of a few socialist groups and the idea of a GMI or even Basic Income is very popular. It’s one of the few things libertarians and socialists can agree on with regards to economic matters.
I think it’s more a case of the politics (“ohmigod, evil Rethuglican policies!”) than the result (fewer poor people). It’s a caricature of course, but how often do we see people dismiss a policy etc because They put it forwards, not Us? Also of course, most libertarian arguments for an NIT are predicated on the dismantling of the rest of the welfare system (or at least most of it), something socialists tend to oppose 
.
Obviously I’ve come at this from a libertarian perspective, though you’re right that a lot of socialists support minimum incomes of one kind or another. I suppose the thing to do would be to make two versions of it:
The NIT: The libertarian version, liked by their supporters more (or at least disliked less). Does good stuff for poor incomes, but little for equality.
Basic Income Payment: The socialist version, does better stuff for equality than incomes… on the basis that being socialist, they have a lot more welfare state stuff already set up to help with incomes.
Another fun thought:
If done right, socialist governments in the game should get a bonus from having a bureaucracy (happy socialists from all the complex wealth-transfer policies, and happy state employees because they’re all, well, employed 
), whilst more libertarian governments will want to reduce it to keep the GDP numbers up and capitalists happy.
You could also opt for a “Severe Bureaucracy” version that is an actual issue you need to fix, to discourage people from trying to buy too many votes .
*Shrug, I disagree but hey if you wana go for it it’s your mod. Also as an aside it is not technically possible to have a socialist county in vanilla democracy 3. Socialism is defined as worker and/or public ownership of industry (and there are as many specific variants as their are for capitalism). The closest you can get in D3 is a social democracy which many socialists deride as capitalism with a happy face.
If there were policies for more public institutions, worker co-ops rather than corporations, common land ownership etc then we might get somewhere.
Don’t know why I forgot to mention it but a basic income (which is a similar concept) mod is included in this pack:
viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8436
Might be what you want but even if not you can take a look into how it works for inspiration.
Yeah I know what you mean - D3 (god I keep thinking of Diablo 3 when I see that 
) would I think be improved if we could have (for example) compulsory voting as a policy, or call elections early (as in the UK etc), or for that matter change the form of government.
For that matter, I find it somewhat skewed towards government intervention in that there’s no simulation for much charitable giving etc. Think back to the ultra-libertarian mid/late Victorian era, when the big capitalist names were throwing up worker housing, Carnegie libraries or town halls and such - you can’t really model that in D3 by default. On the other hand, you might end up with a rather crowded main screen if you tried to do it all shrug.
Thanks .
I think better ideas would be to break up income tax into 3 policies, one for poor, one for middle income and one for the rich (I break people into 9 classes myself, you could be poor with a low paying job or poor with no job at all or rich with 1 mansion or rich with 9 houses etc.) rather than the current one income tax for everybody. This way there’s more flexibility and the numbers are easier to understand like if I made an Ireland scenario would the default income tax be at 41% (the higher rate) or 31% (halfway between the higher and lower rates) ? Rather than tax shelters not taxing the rich people’s income so much would keep them happy (maybe less than 50% makes them happy and above makes them upset and causes brain drain and tax evasion). Naturally there wouldn’t be so much tax evasion caused by poor people dodging high taxes as they haven’t so much money to tax in the first place.
Agreed, although it does add to the complexity. Other options could be (not) taxing government employees’ salaries or welfare benefits etc (Why tax money you’ve just given out after all ?), or (for the real spreadsheet warriors out there) halving a lot more income bands:
Start with the table here (or one like it), then have a one-off slider-filled window for income tax (would also eliminate the need for a separate flat tax policy):
Another idea is income tax fixed to the minimum wage (1p for earning it, 2p for twice it and 3p for 3 times and so on), this would mean minimum wage would have to be a policy as opposed to a dilemma but I’d like to see that anyway. A maximum wage would be an interesting policy to have as well, especially linked to the minimum. It could be as low as twice it or as high as 101 times it.
It’d be nice if dilemmas appeared as policies after you signed up to them (or not) in general actually. It’s weird having an invisible minimum wage after all.
Indeed. I think dilemmas are pretty pointless actually. Not sure if the new airport dilemma is still around but that could be simulated by airline tax anyway.