The Third Leg

Under the Third Leg, one-time gains, up to a certain limit, could be spread out over subsequent years through the use of an income stabilization trust fund, subject to certain key conditions. Only those monies withdrawn annually would be taxed as ordinary income. The fund would come under the aegis of the POPE system executive structure.

This measure could be most useful in smoothing out a good many of the troublesome oscillations in fortune that repeatedly bedevil our micro- and macro-economic affairs. I regard such smoothing out as essential for any socio-economic complex to be considered well-run, fair-minded and predictable in its flows.
What the measure does is work to protect earners exposed to wide swings in fortune in their professions, who happen to do well for brief periods in their lives (athletes, authors, inventors, actors, prospectors, heirs et al) or only intermittently. The specific evil it protects them against is a concentration of lifetime income in the span of only a few years, with the disastrously high tax rates that result, relative to those whose work circumstances allow the same amount of income to be spread out evenly over the course of their entire work life.

Depositors would open flow-smoothing accounts into which the product of good years would go, without being taxed, under a trust agreement with the federal government. These accounts would hold depositors to certain key terms (described below). In return, the account-holder would be able to withdraw funds, as needed, to live on during the lean years, paying tax accordingly.
This is not a novel concept: it's the same process whereby lottery winnings are held in trust, so that winners don't lose an inordinate share of the money won to a disastrously high forfeiture in income tax. In point of fact, the type of earnings I'm referring to are not markedly different from winning the lottery, since they are not predictable, and subject to a great degree of luck.
To obviate a tie-up of liquidity that might harm the general economy's ability to fund more dynamic areas of activity, such a system would need to impose monthly deposit limits. There would also have to be limits on total amounts eligible for protection, inversely proportional to age. These ceilings on accounts would decrease as a person approached the average age of death until a basic minimum of 15 years worth of average nationwide individual income was left, where it would remain until the holder died.
Lest these accounts contribute to excessive trans-generational wealth roll-over that could undercut the causes of social equity, the opening of accounts would be predicated on the condition that the public (via the government) be included as a beneficiary equal to the largest named beneficiary in the division of accounts upon the death of the holders. The more named heirs, the less the public's share would be. This would encourage the dispersal of inherited wealth among a greater number of beneficiaries by those who did not care to see a large sum going to the government on the occasion of their death - a predictable sentiment, no doubt, among most.
A tremendous amount of money would, inevitably, be deposited in such a trust fund. The upside of that would be a huge cash reserve available to the government for the doing of good works, more especially the initial funding of a national single-payer healthcare system, comparable to what one finds in other developed nations - itself a great booster of social equity and protector of business competitiveness and business viability.

That concludes my thoughts on the POPE system. I construe these items to be only the starting point of a much more comprehensive governmental approach toward protecting social equity right at the point of pay, (as opposed to trying to repair the damage done by social inequity later).