More questions about a Portland Citizens Dividend
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

This is a follow up to my original post on the Portland Citizen’s Dividend that you can find here: https://medium.com/@danieladler/a-portland-citizens-dividend-986c95b2bf9
I wanted to address a few more questions that have come up since the first post was published. First of all, I want to thank everyone who gave feedback and encourage everyone reading this to give feedback of any kind and help share the posts, like us on FB and spread the idea. The details of this plan are not set in stone and your feedback can help shape the final outcome.
So here are a few of the good questions I have been getting:
- What about using a crypto currency or local scrip?
a. I think those are great ideas, but…
This is a radical and controversial idea to begin with, maybe one big new idea at a time. - What about a property tax instead?
a. Personally I love the idea of a Georgist land tax but…
Multnomah County already has some incredibly high property taxes and it is surrounded by counties that don’t. Raising a new property tax would be incredibly difficult and face steep opposition and likely would raise rent, which is already too damn high. But at some point, if we could transfer some of that property tax into a dividend, I would totally support it. - Why not a basic income?
a. I think we are still a long way off from funding that.
It needs more proof of concept first. I realize that there have been many successful Basic Income trials, most of them were funded by block grants and reached a few thousand people or a small town. This will be continually self funded and will reach over a half a million people, an entire city.The population of Portland is about equal to the population of Alaska, which receives an annual dividend from the Alaska Permanent fund. The Portland Citizens Dividend would be similar in size and scope to the Alaskan one. - What about a sovereign wealth fund or endowment?
I like the idea. We could grow an endowment portfolio by investing a small portion of the revenue each year for like 30 years until we had enough principle to begin paying out dividends. Its basically what the Alaska Permanent Fund and the North Sea Oil fund did in Norway. The APF has a portfolio value of around 60 bil and will pay out for quite some time even after oil revenues decline.
It would be a way to draw passive income for a public benefit. I think the future of Basic Income is in sovereign wealth funds. The city of Portland has a number of natural monopolies at its disposal that it could easily augment towards increasing the revenue pool of a citizen’s dividend. I really think that all streams of rental income in a society be they from real estate or capital gains or public utilities or intellectual property should flow towards a public distribution. - You’re an absolute madman.
a. Perhaps it takes a madman to think clearly in an asylum.
People always think new ideas are mad. We have a cognitive bias for the familiar. People tend to think if it was a good idea we would have thought of it already or that new ideas have to be half baked. But after a new idea gains acceptance, we feel like we knew it was a good idea all along. Aristotle was a smart guy. He once famously wrote “there is nothing new under the sun”. But of course, there were a lot of things he didn’t know. He probably didn’t know the earth was round or that it revolved around the sun. He definitely didn’t have a good understanding of biology or relativity. Those things would have seemed like madness to him.
When a new idea comes along we undergo what Thomas Kuhn referred to as a “paradigm shift”, a fundamental change in world view that expands our horizon of possibility. One thing we can all agree on is that the status quo isn’t working. None of us are happy with it. This is an experiment, like the ones that Copernicus and Newton did. We are testing a hypothesis. If it fails, we scratch it off the list and start over. This is the process of progress. It is the cost of solving problems. People who don’t experiment don’t make discoveries.
I have a lot more questions/comments to answer, keep them coming. Like us on FB, dont forget to comment and invite your friends.