I think it should be possible to vote proposals that fund in either STEEM or SBD. For example:

> If stakeholders at some point decide they don’t like inflation being used to fund worker proposals, they can create and vote in a “burn” worker that pays a roughly equivalent amount of SBD back to the “null” account

In the circumstance when SBD is overvalued and in short supply it would be preferable to burn STEEM rather than SBD and in some cases vice-versa (although less important since the latter can already be addressed with conversions). There may or may not be other circumstances (apart from burn) when funding STEEM is acceptable or preferable. Possible examples: 1) advertising spend which can be easily ramped up and down in fiat terms, 2) a fund which can accumulates up to some desired balance, and the rate of accumulation isn't that important. 3) donations, prizes or other sorts of promotions where the fiat value doesn't matter much.

This proposal depends on SBD functioning well, so it should take care to help contribute to the successful functioning of SBD rather than potentially add further strains on it (e.g. burning SBD when it is overvalued).

EDIT: I have withdrawn the above comments after reading @yabamatt's reply which points out that proposal can simply be written which sells SBD then burns the STEEM (or can even do this conditionally based on the SBD price), much like my @burnpost project. Given that observation, the added complexity of selectable payouts isn't needed.

On the matter of inflation, I am totally against increasing inflation under almost any circumstances i.e. when not absolutely necessary. I do not believe it is absolutely necessary in this case. Such workers can easily be funded out of the existing reward pool, especially if they are only 1%. This amounts to reducing the reward pool from about 5% to 4% currently, which is hardly a catastrophic decrease (given how poorly the existing reward mechanism works, I'd be happy to reallocate even more to something that works better, but that's another discussion). It also could be feasible, I believe, for worker proposals to be voted that send funds back to the content reward pool, if that is what voters think is their best use (somewhat complicated perhaps by the fact that the existing pool doesn't have an allocated "system account" name like @null, although probably it wouldn't be all that hard to add one).

The reward pool has always (going back to the white paper) intended to reward contributions which add value to Steem, and the existing 7-day content-item voting method is only one way of doing so, not the only one (and not one that is even working all that well). Such worker proposals would amount to adding another method of awarding the same fund for the same (broader) purpose.

Reallocating rather than increasing inflation, apart from long term investor credibility issues, is as a practical matter by far preferable to adding even more supply and selling pressure into the market which has already struggled to maintain a non-declining price for Steem.

One last thing. I understand the historical context of Bitshares workers but I would strongly suggest to rename this to something like a funding or treasury or budget system. "Workers" is somewhat confusing and less compelling of a message to anyone who doesn't come from Bitshares, since the mechanism can fund actual workers but can also fund other things that aren't workers at all (including as you mentioned burn).