The Tavern

Suppose for a second that the government wanted to encourage people to work multiple jobs rather than just one. I don't have exact numbers here (economics isn't my strong point) so just think about the theory here.

Say the government introduced a tax scheme that didn't tax the first 5k people made at each job and then kept ramping up after every additional 1k so they they were taking 90% of every dollar you made after 11k.

Do you think that would successfully encourage people to work several smaller jobs at once? Or would people continue to just work a standard job and lose 90% of most of their income?

I guess people could probably still get by if they were being taxed at 90% but I bet they would at least be encouraged to get a bunch of different jobs in order to maximise their pay.

It's unclear what your goal is and why, but "job" doesn't have a well-defined meaning, except for "someone pays you for something they want you to do".

Given this definition, it's trivial to split up a job into two jobs (or ten jobs) and call them all "separate jobs". So whatever you want to achieve, it's much too easily gamed to be of any practical use.

For the sake of the exercise, say each "job" requires you to at least have a distinct employer. You couldn't just divide what would normally be considered a standard job into a "Monday job", "Tuesday job", etc.

I'm more interested in the theory here so the fact that such a system could be gamed isn't especially relevant. Even though this would never be the case practically, suppose that such a taxation system could be implemented effectively without any cheating of the system or so on.

Do you think a system that taxed in this way would successfully encourage people to branch out into lots of different jobs?

Have you seen Idiocracy movie? IMHO this is what happens when government is not interested in high level specialists and I really doubt it is possible to become high level specialist when you work in 8 different areas 5 hours each per week. High education would be destroyed 100%, what's the point in "wasting" several years when you 90% of your time work as something else?

No I haven't. I think you're probably right in what sort of effect would occur but again, I'm more interested in whether that sort of taxation system would be effective in causing a behaviour change.

I think you're agreeing that a taxation system like this would get people to work in 8 different areas rather than just work a single, normal job (as we consider it now) and lose most of their income?

Would that change if you could technically get by working a single job? I guess as a crawl player you might call that a non-optimal approach to income generation.

Really recommend it. I don't remember most movies but this one got me thinking (and was fun to watch also).


I am not sure, I don't think I would start learning another profession, it's easier to immigrate when you spent 20+ years in one field.
I think it could affect new generation, they would need to plan accordingly. Actually the described situation is similar to what I have in my country, 30 years ago we were crafting different tools for space flights and now all we do is just agriculture Not surprisingly, most people under 20 are dreaming to immigrate from here.

What currency are you talking here? In your example, what proportion of medium income is "5k" and what does the distribution look like?

Do you mean multiple full-time jobs? I wouldn't do that, unless I was about to starve, for example. If working only a single job left me extremely poor, I would consider emigrating.

People who are likely to lose a lot of money will likely make significant changes to their employment pattern. People who don't lose much may not care much.

There is usually some inertia when changes like this occur, but once it starts affecting spending power noticeably, then people will try to adapt.

I'm not really sure. Maybe say a median income is 25k so if you worked 5 x 1 day jobs you would get 25k total and 0 tax.



No, not multiple full-time jobs. The pay for each job would roughly split in proportion with time. So you could work a standard 40 hours at one job for a gross (before tax) of $25,000 or 2 jobs of 20 hours each for 2 x $12,500 and so on.



This is what I think would happen too. Some people might prefer to just stay in a single job (or couple of jobs) because maybe they are used to only doing the same thing(s) every day. But most would try to adapt and branch out into different skills/job schools.

By the way it reminds me my last crawl character, DrCj with autotraining. It was training spellcasting and conjurations too much and to take full advantage of that I learned spells from almost all magic schools, using freezing cloud, fireball, iron shot, conjure ball lightning, bolt of draining, death channel...

A lot of jobs have associated costs (like commute time, or rent somewhere nearby). Unless you do only one job on a particular day ("Monday job", "Tuesday job"), these costs can add up.

You really want to think about the practical concerns rather than the overriding theory of whether a tax system like that would successfully encourage behaviour change

Maybe I can think of a good crawl analogy; I'll sleep on it.

If thrust of your question is "Do people change behavior to avoid paying more tax than they need to" the answer is "yes", there's lots of places where this is currently used by governments to alter behavior, for example a higher tax is imposed on a popular bridge used for commuting, to lower the traffic on that bridge and spread the traffic out so there's less jams coming into a city. Our city imposed a 'sugar tax' recently on sweetened drinks, to discourage their consumption (although I think in that case it's more symbolic, and really will only have an impact in raising awareness, rather than actually being a financial disincentive)

Now I'm not sure what motive a government would have to try to get people to "have lots of jobs" but I have no doubt that people in a capitalist society would find a way to make enough money to survive, there's lots of complexity in how you would structure such a law though, there's currently temp agencies that have employees work several small jobs under one employer, I assume that wouldn't qualify for "lots of jobs" but having "distinct employers" could be bypassed by having subsidiaries of a master company 'hire' the employee several times, or even having consortia of companies that farm out employees to each other (so you are working for company a, then company b hires you for a 'second job' where you work at company a, and company b charges company a for your time, etc. etc. so you end up "really" doing a single job for a single company, but get paychecks from several sources) In a practical sense, your specific example has lots of problems with implementation, even if the motivation was a real one (and I don't see why it would be the case that it would be)

Related to 'expertise loss': There are already a fair number of jobs that exist that are done on a short term, contract type basis, or that are done part time, some of which require expertise, some of which do not. For example I have a friend that works IT, but not for a large IT company, or in a large company for an IT department, what he does is he provides IT services to a large number of small businesses (often single owner-operator or less than a dozen employees) on a contract, as-needed basis, so he ends up working for several different clients in any given week, and gets a "paycheck" from each of them. Although technically he's actually just getting paid from his *own* company, which might violate the OP's conditions. His expertise is in the *type* of work done, not invested in a specific client.

This is about Gnolls, isn't it?

One person can easily be any number of "distinct employers" via LLCs.

Taxes change occupational behavior. There are hundreds of economics papers that investigate the effects of income tax rate on occupational choice and how people divide their time between labor and leisure.

There are important complications when modeling people's behavior under such an extreme taxation scheme. Higher taxes cause workers to move to jobs with lower wages and greater non-money compensation (easier/safer work, better health insurance, comped lunches, whatever). This is one way income taxes distort economies.

I'm curious why you're wondering about such a strange taxation scheme, but I do think it's a fairly interesting question.



That is probably an unrealistic assumption. A person is not usually good enough at a second task to earn the same wage at a different job (e.g. an economist might produce work worth $25,000/year when designing and writing about markets, but only be able to make $15,000 as a gardener, or whatever).

In short. Your proposal would absolutely cause people to move from having a single job to working multiple jobs if they would make more money (+non money benefits) from the latter arrangement. These people would almost certainly not make as much money under the described tax as they did when there were no taxes.

What is the question here? I don't think you've chosen the most effective way to ask what you are trying to ask, unless your underlying question is "how will people respond to the question asked in op?"

Will people change a habit for money? If it's a lot of money, yeah. Conversely, people will spend a small amount of money to keep their lives as they are. Of course, 'a lot' and 'small' are relative and subjective.

Governments change behavior by redirecting wealth. Certain things you can do are penalized, and others are rewarded.

In this scenario, people would still specialize, and would tend to work similar jobs for different companies. Skilled, specialized workers would be in even higher demand than they are now, but how is demand measured in such a system? Assuming companies didn't end up just paying important people 10x more than they are currently paid in order to keep them full time (thereby feeding funds to this proposterous soon-to-be-overthrown government which in turn probably feeds certain industries' big corporations, enabling them to keep up with such a ludicrous tax scheme and crush all competition), demand would be measured in terms of "how few hours of your time are we willing to pay you 5k for?"

The result being that everyone is basically a freelance contractor.

I suspect implementation this of tax scheme would result in a massive increase in tax evasion, a major upswing in utilization of physical vs electronic cash in the economy, and protest or riots from the population.

Yes lol

I think the result would be each person work multiple jobs that are basicaly the same for different companies, possible with contracts worked out so you do something like split the year into 4 quarters and work for a different company each quarter, but do the same basic job, EG programer, for all of them.