This on the one hand leads to a variable income, on the other hand it doesn’t place an obligation on the government that it might not be able to fulfil. Personally I think it’s a better and more elegant policy.
I also like the elegance, but… people being people, I would expect that if five years in a row the “variable income” happens to always be around X, people will start to expect it, will make this expectation a part of their personal finances, and if the next year the income is only X/2, there will be riots in the streets.
(Compare to the mortgage crisis of 2008, which happened because of a change in numbers much less directly related to people’s incomes, and yet many people have lost their homes because they relied too much on the numbers staying constant.)
So I expect that in practice the government would take it at least as a soft obligation, and would use various accounting tricks to keep the income constant (and if that means a disaster in 10 years, the advantage of democracy is that it becomes someone else’s problem).
I also like the elegance, but… people being people, I would expect that if five years in a row the “variable income” happens to always be around X, people will start to expect it, will make this expectation a part of their personal finances, and if the next year the income is only X/2, there will be riots in the streets.
(Compare to the mortgage crisis of 2008, which happened because of a change in numbers much less directly related to people’s incomes, and yet many people have lost their homes because they relied too much on the numbers staying constant.)
So I expect that in practice the government would take it at least as a soft obligation, and would use various accounting tricks to keep the income constant (and if that means a disaster in 10 years, the advantage of democracy is that it becomes someone else’s problem).