I'm going to keep this as short as I can.

As a community, we MUST NOT come to the decision to take the funds for workers proposals from author's rewards.

Steem has one USP for an average new user (bare in mind that users can be considered steem's customers & potential customers); the chance at earning rewards for their posts. Historically, the time when steem's price went through the roof was also when we had a massive influx of new users, coupled with the bull market of course. So, to my mind the most effective way to increase all of our investments (price of steem) is to onboard and retain new steemians. At the moment steem is on far too shaky ground (in regards to new and active users) to ask its customers to directly pay for the backend work. I, and many others, are on Twitter right now promoting #steem hard! Steem has already inspired volunteers to market it! The lower classes of Steem are already doing a huge amount for free! If we put aside the spammy shit postsers among new users, and look at people who are actually creating decent content from the moment they land here, how many of them post a few times and leave because they never see any meaningful reward, or interaction on their posts?

@abh12345 could maybe pull the stats for this. I'm not too technical and only ever used SQL queries for curie curating. All I know is that out of the new users who's posts I've personally witnessed, around 80% of them are doing exactly what I said above. They usually get good engagement on their intro post and then run for the hills when there is nothing on the next 2/3 posts they make. They leave due to their perception that it is a stacked system.

My point is, if we as a community allow more rewards to be taken from the authors to pay what will mainly be already well established Steemians to do coding and development tasks, we will further damage steem's user retention while widening what is already a pretty hefty wealth gap.

I understand that some may see this 'workers proposal' system as an essential thing, and honestly I agree that it may be needed, but not at the expense of further damaging our stated aim; to reward valuable content.

I've voted on the other post for 'donation only' simply to try and avoid what will further damage steem's reputation.

If payment ends up being partially taken from existing inflation sources, please I ask everyone reading this, make sure it is not from author's rewards. For all of the reasons I stated above.

P.s. after reading through some of the comments here I see one great option from @fingersik

Take from declined rewards (i don't see any valid reason not to do that...we need money for development...declined rewards are an awesome source of money for that)