Reducing Inflation(new money sinks)

[Wifye]

I'll start off by saying, a lot of the following content is aimed at combating inflation by increasing money sinks(pulling money out of the general economy) and mixing in some various quality of life improvements as well. Not all of it will be popular and some of it will likely be received negatively but the whole goal is to balance the economy thus improve quality of life.

We all know the economy is getting constantly inflated due to the surge of new players doing the "starter jobs" that pull money from nowhere. That money does get partial dissolved by current money sinks but obviously not all of it so some makes its way into other players pockets. The general idea is to develop ways of removing money from the economy at a pace close to what it comes in at in order to combat inflation.

1. The first item to be considered is a tax based upon owned asset value. In order to not make this a heavy burden but rather just pulling some cash out of the economy, I would say a 1% weekly tax could be implemented. I say weekly because it would be more consistent than a 5% monthly tax for example since a lot can change in a RL month in terms of assets. Now 1% is not much but it adds up quickly given the amount of players and the asset value of players. This tax would purely be based off of owned cars and properties. So if your stuff is worth 100k you pay 1k, if your stuff is 1m you pay 10k. This tax does hurt those with more assets but effects every single player each week. This tax would discourage hoarding lots of vehicles and properties that you really don't use over time thus promoting more sales and sales tax. This tax would not factor in how much money you have in the bank, only owned vehicles and properties.

2. The second item to be considered for implementation of healthcare fees. While the rules require our characters to actually value their lives, it's easy to not really care about your character being at risk besides losing an items on you. By implementing some healthcare costs, it adds another layer of encouraging self preservation. In order to make this not crazy, we'll keep it real simple. Since most food heals you up pretty quickly at around $600 currently(could be wrong), we'll say to get treated by medics would be $750 in order to encourage people not to call the medics to avoid costs of using food or other items to heal. The payment system would work like the ticket system, giving you a notification to pay it with 2 days at the hospital front desk, failure to pay it could result in similar punishments like not paying speeding tickets. If your character is "killed" the fee could be $1,500. This gets controversial with NLR obviously but we don't want people purposely dying to avoid paying for healing costs. The amounts are kept low and not based on percentages as they're not meant to be powerful punishments but rather a small money sinks and add more value to self preservation. If the medics heal 1000 people a week($750,000) and 200 "die"($200,000) that's almost a million out of the economy in a week.

3. The third item to be considered an ATM withdrawl fee at all atms outside of the bank. The fee could be something like $100, since $100 isn't much in game. If there are 1000 withdrawals A week, that's still $100,000 out of the economy a week.

4. The fourth item I'd like to suggest that would probably be popular is a weekly parking pass as an option while still keeping the normal passes as well. Currently a lot of people don't buy parking tickets due to the time factor. I think a weekly pass for $10,000 available at City Hall(basically would have a week's time in minutes) would sell rather well while making LSPD and LSC/Bayviews lives much easier on not constantly having to ticket and tow vehicles. We'll say 250 people buy a weekly parking pass, that's another $2,500,000 out of the economy as well.

Now when you look at items #2, #3, and #4 having an estimated $3,650,000 leaving the economy doesn't seem like much but in a month it's climbs up to above $15,000,000 leaving the economy a month.

As for #1, I can't honestly give an accurate guess on how much it would really pull out but let's lowball at $1,500,000 a week so $6,000,000 a month. When you combine #1, #2, #3, and #4 together, over $20,000,000 leaves the economy entirely on top of all the current money sinks in game already. While all of the suggested money sinks and current sinks probably do not equal the current new money injected into the economy, every little bit taken out helps.

Please feel free to post more ideas or critique/change mine.

Edited June 4, 2019 by Wifye