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Greetings America and welcome to our program,

Today we have another report for you, focusing on the Treasury, its Revenues and their sources. The motivation for this study is the latest Tax Policy, which has produced quite a debate, with some people defending it and others attacking it. Debate is healthy; as long as each party brings forward arguments that's a good thing.

I don't want to bla bla a lot, as the main point of this article is to present actual data, not theories. In economics, data are important in order to predict the outcome of a policy change. Case at point, the current tax policy. I would like to believe that the EC which proposed it had been monitoring the economy and had sufficient data to predict the effects of the new taxes, quantitatively. You can always try to go by experience and guess the outcome of a change, but if you rely on just that then you may get it... wrong!

So far I haven't heard many actual numbers in this debate. Kemal Ergenekon talked about a revenue target of 120k in a comment on his last article; Eli Crownover talked about 200k a couple days ago; and that's all I've seen. Surely there must have been more such numbers out there that I've missed, but I fear that there's not enough quantitative information out there that is public.

In order to bring such information to the debate I decided to monitor the Treasury and try to figure out the sources of the revenues. I've been monitoring it starting from Day 1,432 (actually night of 1,431). The data I've collected are available to anyone who asks for them (PM or comment here). I don't want to make them public here, for reasons of National Security (well.. not really).

So without further ado, time for the main dish.

Tresury Revenues per day:
1,432: 189,400 - Income taxes @ 25%. On food they *may* have been 15% early in the day.
1,433: 213,300
1,434: 208,500 - During evening VAT on weapons changed to 5%
1,435: 164,800 - Early in the day food VAT dropped to 5%.

Where do those money come from? An assumption I make is that there are no donations to the treasury. So all revenues come from taxes. Income tax, VAT and Import tax.

Let's start from Income Tax Revenues.
Plato's accountant, Philohrimatos, puts the average wage around 94 usd with negative outlook atm.
eGov puts the number of US fighters around 2,200 and "actives" at 2,900.
Dodona, while smoking some laurel leaves (Plato allows that, as he is used to the practice), swears to have seen the number 2,500 when he closed his eyes. Then, he says, he blinked twice and saw the number 1,700 on his left side and 800 on the right.
Using the above information I estimate the daily revenues from income tax at $66,000, with the tax at 25%. Up from $40k with a tax of 15%. The outlook is negative.
Feel free to dispute this number, it's just my best guess. Could be as low as 50k and as high as 77k.

Import Taxes: Estimate of 2k usd a day. Could be as low as a few hundred to as high as a few thousand.

Zeus Tax: A very important one and the focus of my data collection.
Zeus buys products every day. A lot of them, as he has to support many. Zeus rests during the first and last hour of day. How much is he paying on taxes? (the following numbers are estimates)
Day 1,432: 81,400
Day 1,433: 93,200 - Food Vat 10%, Weapons VAT 7%
Day 1,434: 89,800 - Weapons VAT dropped to 5% during evening time
Day 1,435: 52,400 - VAT at 5%

No further comment at this point.

VAT - the real one
Estimates are based on total revenues and the tax estimates presented above.
With the rates at 10% for food and 7% for weapons: 50,000 VAT revenue
With the rates at 5% for food and 5% for weapons: 35,000 VAT revenue

[EDIT: Initially I had the last number at 44k, which did puzzle me, but I didn't want to "cook" my data. That was b/c I assumed that food VAT was at 5% for the whole day 1,435. Later o, it came to my attention that food VAT was still at 10% for several hours of the day. Therefore, with the VAT at 5% for both, VAT revenues should have dropped down to 35,000, probably more. I didn't collect data after Day 1,435, so can't say more.]

Further work is necessary in order to get more robust and trustworthy results. Sure I got some things wrong. Sure there are things missing. Tax rates were changing often. Watching Zeus is not easy, as he shows up only certain seconds of the hour. Estimating how many people are working in US companies and how many of them work with MW is also a challenge.
If anyone wants to build on my work, I would be glad to assist him. There are a few things that you have to watch out for, that one may not have thought of yet. I believe that those deciding on tax rates should have access to such data, in order to make the right call.

I left my proposals for the end and I will be brief. Explaining them would make this article even more tl;tr.
I believe Food VAT should go back to 10%. This is the priority.
Reducing Income tax should be the next move.
In the near future, when US will (hopefully) have more resources again, I would like to see income tax around 12%, weapon VAT at 4%, food VAT at 10-15%, Import taxes between 10% and 15% and MW at 20-30 USD.

That's all folks,
thanks for watching.
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