It's the same thing as a pre-mine your just trying to call it something else so by him saying no pre-mine it makes this kind of suspect.  All this does is insures the dev wont dump all the coins he gets from the "tax" at one time while its still in the mining phase.  Roughly 6,666,666 coins will be given to the dev on this "tax", I would just prefer that this goes away in general and I'm sure the majority of people here would too.  A lot of the bounties this "tax" is for could be done free if you help build a good community with people wanting this coin to flourish or the bounties usually get paid by donations from the community.  I have seen this plenty of times before.