How about we cap flagging instead?

Flag content and it costs you exactly what you took from the person you're flagging in terms of money and rep. Then require commentary on each and every flag and allow users to appeal that since it does not only monetary damage, but rep damage.

Your flag the other day on my post cost me an entire rep point even though I was busy talking to those who upvoted and explaining that several of the upvotes were coming from people i was contacting via email to discuss a business that would be using their infrastructure and because this was crypto world i had no other way to verify my ident.

It took me forever to get that rep point, and you took it away because you felt my post wasn't worth the money it generated despite it becoming an active discussion on the merits of voting and curation. Eventually the big voters filtered in and removed their upvotes so it would have gone to 0 anyways. But you did damage to my rep and god only knows how long it will be before I get that point back.

If you cap earnings then what will happen is sock puppet city, just like when you capped maximum number of blog postings. Limiting speech on a free speech centered platform is never going to fix it and money is the ultimate form of speech. You need to loosen the restraints not tighten them. The core of this problem is the fixed daily payout amount. Get rid of that and tie it to user activity instead.