Government's track approximately how much they spend on citizens: education, health, benefits, services administered. It's probably more of a spreadsheet division rather than actively tracked and optimised.
I propose everyone is give a citizen account which is a digital account and tracks what the government has invested in you so far from birth. You account begins as a negative number. When you pay tax, the number goes upwards and heads towards 0 and then a positive balance.
Government would like its citizens to earn an income for the country. I propose all spending on citizens is treated like an investment and citizens are provided with materials regarding what is expected of the investment.
This data would let us do a comparison of each cohort in society and see what spending produced what results - in real people's lives. Education would get better.-- chronological, Apr 01 2020 This sounds remarkably sensible, although generalized information on per-capita expenditure is available.-- 8th of 7, Apr 01 2020 There isn't an account I can login to see what society has paid for me directly.
Policies taking effect in 1990 produced my life up until now.
There's a very long lead time in predicting what will happen when policies are changed. This idea could account for that.-- chronological, Apr 01 2020 As a demographic only men over 40 return more than they cost.-- Voice, Apr 01 2020 I basically see nothing wrong with this.-- sninctown, Apr 01 2020 Yes, and the weirdness is worrying us.-- 8th of 7, Apr 01 2020 How is the spending tracked? The government pays a bin lorry to come to my street once every few weeks and empty the bins. Suppose the lorry and staff can be accounted for as costing £1000 per trip. But my neighbour buys the vegetables from the supermarket with plastic wrapping, whereas I buy the unwrapped ones, and that means he puts more rubbish out, so shouldn't he be accounted as using a higher percentage of the bin-lorry budget than me? Also, I put my bin out on the kerbside but he puts his out on the pavement so the bin men take approximately 1/10 of a second longer to wheel his bin to the lorry than they take to wheel mine. How does your proposed system account for those cumulitive 1/10ths of a secondses? Also, I wash my rubbish before putting it in the bin, but the woman on the other side doesn't, I've seen her throw out yoghurt pot lids with bits of yoghurt still on them. That will only make the inside of the bin lorry dirtier and will cost money to clean off. I think that should be added to her account and not mine.-- pocmloc, Apr 01 2020 Commercial organizations do it all the time. It's that, or go out of business.-- 8th of 7, Apr 01 2020 For the bin collections, I'd divide the cost of sending the truck out by the number of homes collected from. That's your household's cost.
Imagine an app that showed a real time cost of you as a citizen.-- chronological, Apr 01 2020 The Ferengi have that ...
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How about an app that shows the real-time cost of your children, with extrapolations ? For situations like "Daddy, can I have a pony, pleeeeese ?"
For further information on that, the cost is given by a tangent function with the argument (Theta -> pi/2) ...-- 8th of 7, Apr 01 2020 Children who have children might not return quite as much as the stock market but they are remarkably recession-proof-- sninctown, Apr 02 2020 random, halfbakery