Economy - Debt

[Deantwo]

Was discussing ideas of debt. Like I have a few times. Most recently:

my biggest beef with the law system, is still how taxing works :thinking: i like how Off-world Trading Company does it, tracking your debt separately and having you manually pay it (or toggle it to automatically pay)... it would mean people had to actively pay their taxes... and it becomes a lot easier to make automatic punishments for not conforming to the tax laws, since you could then make laws and demographics that check the amount of debt players have 😃 i forget if i have an issue/suggest post for this... i will check later :sweat_smile:

i love the idea of being about to make a law that prevents people from voting in elections if they have too much debt... or even prevent certain crafting if they have a high amount of unpaid debt... things like that we will have players creating their own punishment systems... a fine would actually do something until it is paid off :smiley: i guess loans could also be a type of debt, but towards a specific player, instead of towards a government :thinking: yeah, i might have thought tooooo much about all that

Basically debt need to be tracked separately from current bank balance. Probably the easiest is to only have debt towards the government, but would be nice to also allow players to permit debt towards each other, or at least companies and banks.

Think first of just debt towards the government. All tax laws would no longer take money from some bank account belonging to the player, it would instead simply increase the amount of debt a player has towards the government. The player would then have to actively pay off their debt with whatever money they want, when they want.

If debt isn't paid off, nothing would happen at first. But players would then have to design laws that punish players for having too much unpaid debt. For example a punishment could be that you couldn't vote in elections or run for offices while you have unpaid debt. Maybe if you have a lot of unpaid debt you aren't allowed to do actions that would cause pollution. Basically the players would be designing their own tax laws with punishments for not paying their taxes.

Quality of life options to include:

• A way to have debt be automatically paid using a designated bank account, would help players not need to micromanage debt payment if they have plenty of money.
• Allow government money allocation to automatically pay off debt if there is any first. Negative debt could be redeemed, allowing for the government to owe a player money.

[trickenso]

Some other thoughts: Allow banks to run fractional reserve lending, overdrafts and charge interest. Funded with capital, or by other means. They could be offered as general debt trades, auctions, or similar to the current contract-like system. Anything that creates a clearing house for debt rather than needing everything to be negotiated and administrated individually might be useful.

[johnkslg]

I like these ideas and would love to greatly expand debt. Something we will do in the future.