Cap N' Trade Citizenship

Hello Econominauts,

(This is my first post in what will hopefully be a series into my political ideas concerning citizenship, political systems, and the New Way at large)

Normally I feel like it would be necessary for me to explain in length what Cap and Trade economic principles are, however, It's 1 A.M. and I believe in everyone's ability to use a google search engine. As always, leave the moral rants at the door, this is about economics and solving problems.

Let it begin!

So how do you solve the immigration issue, increase the number of people in the middle class and keep the population in check? You create incentives that lead your goal, you create Cap N' Trade.

How does this work? At the age of 18 every citizen in the United States would be granted 1.5 citizenship tokens. If they choose to have children, they can use these tokens to grant their children citizenship (level 1 citizenship, but that's for another post). If they don't choose to have children, they can sell them in the marketplace. The price of the token (and half tokens) is completely determined by the laws of supply and demand. Anyone in the world can buy these tokens. While this system sounds incredibly simple, the effects are far reaching. I'll go into each area affected.

Immigration- Currently the word on every candidates lips, immigration has become a hot topic because of Trumps antics and a "us vs. them" mentality among a lot of Americans. The problem is simple enough, the people who are trying to get in legally are having an incredibly tough time and the people we don't want are just swimming over. Obviously everything is a little more complex than that, but my citizenship plan fixes a lot of these issues.

1. Wealthy foreigners who want to start a life here can purchase citizenship instantly for themselves and their whole families. No muss, no fuss. Every time a wealthy foreigner becomes an American our tax base expands, this helps everyone out.

2. Those with family already here can be donated an excess coupon and be brought over.

3. There has to be some ramification for those who try to take part in the benefits of citizenship without actually paying for it (i.e illegal immigrants). I have yet to find a suitable solution to this problem namely for moral reasons, however, the simple solution is to make them purchase one from the marketplace using a government loan at a fixed Interest rate. They have a set amount of time to pay it off, if they fail to, they're deported.

Expand the Middle Class- The middle class expands when a couple things happen. A) people are born into it and then stay in their strata. B) those in a lower class achieve escape velocity and then maintain footing. C) The upper class loses their money and power and descends.

Shrinking poverty levels and giving those in that class an escape hatch is paramount to a stable economy. Currently the poorer half of the population is growing faster than the wealthier half. It's been known for decades that poor people tend to have more children than their wealthier counterparts. By implementing my token based citizenship approach we're giving those born into poverty a way to make money by incentivizing they have less children. By selling their token in the marketplace we're ensuring they're having less children (until a later, richer, date when they can afford the price of a token on the marketplace) and they have enough money to (probably) achieve some form of higher education. This helps increase the middle class by stopping the inherent population growth of the poverty class and by boosting those already in it into the middle class.

Conclusion- As with anything, the devil's in the details. How do you make sure people aren't having children when they don't possess any citizenship tokens? What happens if someone fails to pay for them? Can we really deny a child rights because their parent didn't have the proper token? These are all messy issues we'd have to work out, however, I feel confident that the net benefits of this system far outweigh what we are currently doing.

Preview- My next blog post will outline my plan for tiered citizenship levels and will hopefully justify to readers why I don't believe in democracy. Yep, the cats out of the bag, I think democracy sucks. 

JEE