I’m not sure if you’re taking suggestions for policies, but it strikes me that there isn’t a “capitalist” (or at least, non-socialist) way to reduce homelessness. Rent Allowance would be the obvious way to accomplish this, in the same vein as school and healthcare vouchers. Maybe also Rent Tax Credits?.
I would make the same recommendation for Social Care, unless I’m misunderstanding the scope of that policy (I guess having a voucher system would require like, a state social care and private social care variable etc). Might be a bit much work.
Regarding ways to interact with water shortages and the water industry, my country of Australia has widespread water restrictions and the policy irl has some significant research into the economic/welfare effects. Worth mentioning, at least.
Should food price inform the cost of the Food Stamps policy?
Also, thanks for including Payroll Taxes- they’re my favourite tax to remove in any game I play
Retirement age shouldn’t be an uncancellable policy because if you remove Retired Benefits then how does it become relevant?
But in the general theme of your post I agree the Capitalist policies are not always equivalent. For example, Hospital Overcrowding is permanent without some level of State Health Service, even if you include voucher policy. Even though overcrowding would cause prices to rise or increased supply of hospitals, for instance, which would solve the problem. Private healthcare should be able to eliminate the negative situation.
“Legalize building houses” seems to be the popular capitalist policy to address homelessness. Or to put it in a less flip manner, loosening zoning restrictions and regulations on house building. Of course, anyone who already owns a house has a vested interest in housing costs staying high.
I guess it could be argued that ‘help to buy’ policies, such as those used in the UK, would be a ‘capitalist’ solution to homelessness, but really its a perversion of the market, and its correct to say that the true free market solution would be relax planning restrictions.
As always, the problem is avoiding creating a stupidly over-compex sim that is totally impossible to balance. Because of this I am always wary of adding new ‘always-on’ policies that the player always has to deal with.
Maybe we need a national parks policy? one that restricts building on such land by default, and which would be in-place by default for the UK and USA at the start, but cancellable. Theoretically letting anybody build a house in yosemite would reduce property prices
Water conservation regulations as a policy also sounds like a good idea, albeit one the current US president apparently has issues with.
Maybe we need a national parks policy? one that restricts building on such land by default, and which would be in-place by default for the UK and USA at the start, but cancellable. Theoretically letting anybody build a house in yosemite would reduce property prices
A big-ish debate in the USA around national parks is around drilling and mining and other resource extraction, so it could also affect the GDP and jobs, and preserving them keeping environmentalists and liberals happier.
Indeed. I was thinking it might be cool to have a US-specific ‘allow oil pipeline in national park’ dilemma, that would affect the oil price (lower!) but upset ethnic minorities (indigenous people) and obviously environmentalists.
I figured it was in line with other options that don’t crowd out the private sector (electorally, inoffensive to capitalists like the other vouchers and tax credits are) whilst promoting equality (of opportunity) in the same way the state options do. Currently the player’s options for housing are very limited- you either let the private sector go free (guaranteeing bad situations like property speculation), subsidise the rich/middle (mortgage tax relief), or go socialist (either with second home ban, empty home tax, rent control or state housing).
I think a housing price sim value might make sense, but I have a lot more patience as a dev and player for tuning and interacting with highly complicated models than I think most people do (including your target audience, I think), and you have a lot of stuff on your plate already.
By the way, how come trading limits is an uncancellable?
Are you saying that the ‘no limits’ option should effectively be cancelling the policy? That would make sense actually…and reducing the number of always seen policies is a good thing…
