Today every financial transaction in which credit is accepted is enforced by the government. This is to say, that when you decide to buy anything from a chocolate bar on your debit card to signing for a mortgage you are entering into a contractual agreement to pay that amount.
Currently all such transactions are enforced by the government “for free” (we know it isn’t free it’s our taxes paying for it) but what if that protection was converted from a hidden charge in taxes to an overt transparent fee?
So when I go the store and buy my chocolate bar for $1.00 and instead of paying cash I decide to use debit card a small fee of 1 or 2 % is added onto the actual amount and that percentage represents the government’s duty to enforce my compliance with the terms under which I just used the credit system. If I had decided to use the dollar in my pocket the Chocolate bar would only have cost a dollar, not a dollar and one cent.
Just thinking of myself, that simple transparent process would generate quite a healthy revenue stream. I would say that on average I use my debit card about 20 times a month and always for more than a $1.00 transaction. For arguments sake I’ll average the amount spent per transaction at $50.00 x 20 = $1000.00, 1% of which is $10.00. Per year the total is $120.00. This amount, taken as an average for the
USA (using the same figures I used to determine the number of people contributing to private donations) with 155 million persons accruing this level of charges per year would generate $18,600,000,000.*
To show that the above estimate is on the low side, this site says “U.S.-based financial institutions relied on Visa's processing system, VisaNet, to facilitate $1.6 trillion in transactions”. At 1% that is 16 billion dollars in revenue, and that is only from 1 Credit card.
Now most transactions carried out by individuals are small change when compared to business transactions. The same 1% applied against a multi-million or muti-billion dollar business contract would create an enormous sum per year. How many credit transactions are conducted by all the business’ in the USA every year? I can not find any specific data on this but this table provided by the US census Bureau gives an indication of the amount of revenue that business could generate for government. The total of all the figures listed for “Sales, shipments, receipts, revenue or business done” equals $99,732,837,593,000. If even one tenth of that amount was deemed to be from credit transactions, at 1% the total revenue would equal over $99 billion dollars per year.
It is important to note that this amount is an estimate only and does not take into account anything other than credit transactions by business’.
Business acquisitions, mergers, takeovers and the like would generate trillions more dollars per year which could be similarly protected by the government. It is important to note that any of these transactions could be conducted without paying to have them insured, but then the participants in the agreements would not enjoy the automatic protection of the government, having agreed of their own free will not to pay for the service.
This is not to say that one of the companies could not go to the government to have the law enforced if their agreement is broken. It would just mean that they would have to pay the total cost of any investigation and all the resources used by the government in investigating and prosecuting their case. When large breach of contract cases often take years to investigate and bring to court and are then followed by numerous appeals it is easy to see that a company would probably prefer to pay the insurance.
* The assumption being taken as a working principal is that banks, credit companies and other parties lending credit would demand their customers pay the fee in order that the credit company have legal recourse to recoup losses from defaulters.
Patents & Trademarks
A patent is legal protection of an individuals, or corporation’s inventions. In the US patents even cover “research, except "purely philosophical" inquiry”. Patents normally have a set period of time (20 years) in which they are in force, but this period can be extended by the creator/s paying a maintenance fee. [source]
The US Patent Office issued 484,955 patents in 2007 according to this document. When it comes to fees for patents it is not as simple as you might think. On page 2 of the document referenced above is a list of the fees applicable to patents. To simplify my calculations I will use the “Basic Filing Fee – Utility Application” amount to determine the revenue from Patents, which works out to $412,211,750
Trademarks are another legal protection of property (usually intellectual), this time covering products or services originating from a unique source and to distinguish the property from other sources. Trademarks do not have to be registered and can still be prosecuted by law when not registered but may only be protectable within a certain geographical area.
According to this document in 2002 the US registered 469,000 trademarks. There are three different fee amounts listed which average $342.00 for total estimated revenue of $160,398,000.
I’m sure there are some other contractual agreements that the government ought to have a hand in but it would be far too much to spell out each of them to provide an example here. Needless to say that just from these few examples I estimate revenue of $118,905,447,343 and the actual amount would probably be far in excess of that sum.
For those that have been keeping track, of our original estimated budget requirement of $550.611,000,000 we have so far eliminated $273,921,655,346 leaving us with $276,689,344,654. We are over half way to our goal of proving that a government can be financed completely through voluntary donations, legitimate fees and service charges.
No comments:
Post a Comment