Taxes

[jalapeno777]

Having the ability for plot owners to be taxed at regular intervals to the mayor's economic account and the town as well to be taxed to a region owner's account is the one thing really stopping this plugin from being all it could be.

[jmhertlein]

Sounds good. I've always toyed around with the idea, so let's set it for the v2.4.0 milestone.

[elbobtons]

+1 for this, i would love this feature as well. It would make towns more dynamic. Maybe also some sort of upkeep for the actual town to be deducted from the town bank, so the town account dosnt accumulate insane amounts of cash over time.

[jmhertlein]

Bumping this up to v2.3.0

[GrantWasil]

One thing that I think would be a cool feature on top of taxes would be a Global Town Tax. Kind of like a re-registration tax. Maybe every month or changeable period. A town would have to pay a server tax to remain a town or it would be disbanded or such. Just another idea on top of this.

[jmhertlein]

I've started work on this feature. So far, I've re-arranged the config.yml file and added some tax-related stuff:

https://github.com/jmhertlein/MCTowns/blob/dev-taxes/src/main/resources/config.yml

So, what'll happen is:

1. Mayor enables tax collection for his town
2. Mayor sets the delay between tax collections
3. Mayor sets the amount that will be taken from each citizen at each tax collection.
4. Taxes are not collected immediately. Instead, the specified delay time is waited before the first collection occurs.

With these limitations:

1. The mayor can only enable taxes if both economyEnabled is true, and taxesEnabled is true.
2. The delay between collections cannot be smaller than that specified by minTaxDelayInTicks
3. The amount collected per-citizen cannot be higher than the amount specified by maxTaxAmount.

So, with this method, the server owner controls how frequently taxes are collected and how much can be collected, but the delay and tax amount can be different for each town.

Planned features:

• force synchronization: mayors get no say in when taxes are collected- they are collected either on a delay or at a specific time (specified in the config.yml)
• percentage-based collection: minTaxAmount and the per-town tax amount allow either explicit amounts, or percentages (of the player's total wealth)
• Town fee: charge each town a certain fee to keep existing

Potential features:

• Progressive and regressive taxes: let the poor and rich pay either lower or higher amounts or percentages.

Questions for you guys:

• What should happen when a citizen cannot pay up (at a tax collection)?
• What should happen when a town cannot pay up (when a town fee is collected)?

[jmhertlein]

Feature update:

Instead of progressive or regressive taxes, there will be a way to specify overrides for individual players. So, if you want to be able to let some friends pay 0 tax, you can do that. A rich person doesn't want to pay 30% of his 8,000,000 simoleon fortune at each collection? You can set it so he only pays 2%, while keeping everyone else at 30%.

[jalapeno777]

Here are a few options for a citizen not being able to pay:

a) Allow a config setting (by town) to allow a temporary owing balance to give players a chance to catch up. Ie they can still owe but mayors can see who is owning money and can evict at their own pleasure.
b) Wage garnish...hook into vault and autodeduct a percentage of earnings (if possible to detect) to put towards their rent.
c) Auto-evict upon defaulting on rent. Ownership of plot is removed and given back to the town allowing mayors to effectively claim any assets within the plot as reimbursement.

Options if a town does not pay:
a) Similar to citizen option A...allow for towns to have a temporary owing balance and have it reclaimed as money comes into the town allowing admins to choose the next course of action or towns to catch up if debt is temporary.
b) Put the town up for auction, allowing prospective mayors to effectively bid on claiming ownership of the town and it's residents. Current mayor is evicted from town. Minimum auction bid would be a fairly high % of the amount owing
c) Dissolve the town...all plots/claims are removed.

[jmhertlein]

I don't think auto-evict and auto-dissolve are good options (too destructive), and I don't want to start taking on too many functions of an economy plugin (remembering a negative balance for each player or town, a-la the A options).

One way I came up with is, if the person can't pay, it could just take as much as it can and report it to the mayor if the player missed payments. Then when the mayor logs on, or runs a command to check "/town economy taxes summary" (or, ultra-terse form "/to e t s", coming soon to every command near you), he gets a report of how many taxes were collected at the last collection period, and who wasn't able to pay.

Thoughts on any of this?

[apengstrom]

Here's my two cents, maybe these are some ideas:

1. Players can choose whether or not taxes get taken automatically, or if they pay them manually.
2. Players do not get kicked out automatically, ever.
3. Town mayors and assistants can keep record of the taxes, who owes, who pays, who is overdue.
4. Town mayors and if allowed, assistants, can kick players out of the town.

Any thoughts on what can be done with player's items that are left in a plot? i.e. chests, etc. Perhaps set an option to disable a player's ability to do anything in their plot until they pay taxes to date? I'm trying to think of how this would integrate with Lockette, LWC, etc. and other different locking plugins.