A Modest Proposal

[Yelnoc]

I was flipping through the threads when I saw this post by Marokai.

What I can't bear is dealing with these issues forever and ever, personally.

Over a year ago I wrote a new set of income tax brackets that were basically supposed to cut the deficit in half by now. But nothing or very little has apparently changed in the stats, and people don't pay any attention to PS's former reporting as GM. We had a ton of unemployment issues withe economic crash a year and ahalf ago, but after pulling out every possible economic measure we could out of our hats and then doubling down on them, nothing changes. We doled out huge amounts of cash to regions to deal with their individual shortfalls, but apparently, nothing's changed there either.

I understand the need to have pressing issues for the Senate to respond to, but maybe another part of the problem is not the Senate refusing to respond to the GM, but everyone else refusing to respond to the Senate.

This got me thinking.  Our "economic system" is clearly broken at both a federal and state level.  We legislators pass bills that have no effect, especially at the regional level where statistics on the economy and budget are impossible to come by.  We have an active game moderator like Badger who is able to stay on the ball; however, many of us pay no attention.

What I would like to do is wipe the slate clean.  Fix the unemployment rate and all other economic statistics to their current values in the United States.  Naturally, this would void all of the stimulus's and similar economic legislation the senate has worked on in years past.  That's unfortunate but possibly the best thing from a game play standpoint. 

"Why won't the same problems that plagued the system before crop again?" 

For one, starting over will reduce the complexity in figuring out where we should be economically.  From there it will be much easier to calculate the effect each bill has.  I want to make an even deeper change though.

As I said earlier, Badger is a great GM but I'm sure he can feel overwhelmed at times with just the federal stuff.  The region's need a little more lovin'.  Honestly, I would prefer we go with Ogis's proposal and replace the regions with a lower federal house because of activity reasons but I've seen there is not enough support for that and don't want to bring it up here.  In place of that, I propose assigning a deputy mod to each region to track economic and budgetary statistics and introduce mod events so that the legislatures have something to react to rather than cycling through the same old bills. 

There is one thing that could thwart this; inactivity.  If the senators and legislators don't respond to the mod events or the mods don't respond to the legislative efforts than this will all be for naught.

Suffer from tl;dr?  Here it is in bullet format:

• Wipe the slate clean (Economically)
• Make regional "deputy" mods

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I'm not sure starting over is really necessary, as opposed to the possibility of affixing current figures by a combination of statute & GM edict, much like what was done some Senates back with a bill that set forth clearly defined federal tax rates.

[tmthforu94]

An interesting you mentioned the need for "regional GM's". I completely agree with you on this matter, which is why it was included in my platform (See Below). Whether the GM would become a "Deputy" or a "Co-GM", I think it's extremely important that regional issues are adressed, so that regional legislatures can have real problems to solve.

This ticket believes a way to solve that problem would be to take the load off one GM by creating a second one.

I believe elected legislatures can be important and beneficial to the game, and think that they'd be even more productive than they already are if they had an adequate amount of information from the GM, close to like we had in the day's of Purple State as GM.

With two game moderators, one would work specifically on regional affairs, and the other on foreign and national affairs.

[Marokai Backbeat]

We've wiped a few things clean just for simplicity's sake in the past but I don't really see the need for a complete economic reboot, or for regional GMs. I do think my post raises an interesting point though, where I do have to side with the Senate that people really easily get away with bashing. They probably don't have alot of motivation to do things when they get almost no attention or have almost no impact.

[Grumpier Than Thou]

This brought a tear to my eye :')