Consider the modern road system. 90% of the traffic it carries benefits business: Trucks moving goods, and employees going to and from work. Yet there's no special tax on businesses to balance the special benefit they get from a multi-trillion dollar investment of taxpayer money. Waterworks, sewage and trash disposal, police and fire services, and the myriad other pieces of modern infrastructure are all constructed and operated at taxpayer expense, and the benefits are definitely not distributed equally in return.

One problem I have around here is that I have to preface so many posts with something along the lines of "every damn thing you know is wrong."

Trucks pay much higher road taxes than cars do.

There are enormous property taxes on businesses, much higher than on residential properties. Businesses also pay the going rate for water, electricity, and everything else, including any capital surcharges.

If you actually LOOK at the numbers, the benefit actually flows the other way, with most lower-end taxpayers getting a nearly-free ride on the heavy taxpayers. Here where I live, one of the major dot.com giants has chosen to settle in our town, and we have bathed happily in the largesse from the massive taxation levied on them.

The rich, who pay almost all the income taxes, and probably most of the non-business property taxes, get absolutely nothing extra out of the infrastructure that the poorest person in the city doesn't get.

"Social credits" is just one more permutation of distribution of wealth from the productive to the non-productive. The result would not be a flowering of new creativity (except maybe in some artistic circles that are irritated at the idea of having to make a living with their work), but an ever-growing population of wards of the State.

And as that population grows, more and more load will fall on those actually creating wealth as the State taps more of it to feed their pets.

Did you learn nothing from communist societies? "Bread and circuses?" Or the last few decades of our pre-reform welfare society?

And again, as the population of wards grows, the political pressure will be constant to increase the "alms" from the State, adding more and more benefits and money.

It not only won't work, it can't work.

Tell you what, try it out in some city or state first, and we'll see how it goes.