Join the new world

There are two things occupying a great deal of discussion in our media and forums right now, and both of them are almost complete nonsense:

1. The "LOWER OUR TAXES" argument

and

2. The "scandal" over the FEC spreadsheet.

I'll discuss each one in more detail below but here's the tl;dr version:

Neither of these things are driven by legitimate concern, and both are based on almost complete crap.

1. THE TAX NONSENSE:

Let me start out by saying that, in an ideal world, the eUS government wouldn't need any taxes. I'm not ideologically committed to high taxes. However, we do actually need our government and military to have sufficient resources to pay for MPPs, outfit our soldiers, run our outreach and new player assistance programs, and run our weapon distribution programs. These things are not free.

Now, that still begs the question, how do we know our taxes aren't too high? Two reasons. First, the rate wasn't set arbitrarily, we arrived at it months ago by raising and lowering the income tax rate and carefully monitoring market prices, wages, and government revenues. We were eventually able to figure out that at 28%, we were pushing citizens out of the country and wages weren't able to keep up, and government revenues fell. At 20% we were bringing in decent government revenues but less than we needed to keep up with our military needs. We moved the rates around within those bounds and eventually settled at 23% as the "sweet spot" where government revenues were high, but so was player retention.

Second, we know taxes aren't too high because we can do the math to figure out what the proposed tax cuts would mean to citizens, and compare that with what these cuts would mean for our country. Right now, if you're a skill 6 worker, you're grossing about $20/day. Currently your take-home pay is about $15.40. Now, that's a noticeable hit, but let's see what happens if we make the proposed cut in taxes: Your take home pay will be about $17. You've got yourself and extra $1.60. That means less than 4 extra health per day at current food prices, barely enough for one extra fight per week.

$20.00 x 0.23 = $4.60 paid in taxes
$20.00 x 0.15 = $3.00 paid in taxes
$4.60 - $3.00 = $1.60 savings under the new tax plan, just about 8% of your income (obv)

Now let's look at what that would mean for governmental tax revenues. Currently, our VAT and Import tax rates in this country are as low as we can possibly set them. They're not bringing in much revenue at all, meaning that 23% income tax revenue is pretty much 100% of our governmental tax base. What does lowering that from 23% to 15% mean for the government? It means cutting government expenditures by just over 30%. That's 1/3 fewer Marines, 1/3 fewer Airborne, 1/3 fewer guns handed our from Arm America, etc.

This plan would lead to HUGE harm being done to our government while providing VERY little in the way of benefit to our citizens. That's not opinion, that's math.

2. THE "SCANDAL"

First, let's give some background for those of you unfamiliar with how our community got so retarded as to have a huge fight over a spreadsheet. The FEC (federal elections commission) was designed as a collaboration between the top five parties to make sure that no foreign spies were allowed to be candidates in our congressional elections. This is critical to preventing PTOs (political takeovers), which are operations by foreign powers that try to sneak candidates into our congress, use those congressmen to give citizenship to more foreign operatives, and eventually, infiltrate our government to cripple us. Since its inception the FEC has been run in a non-partisan fashion and has had a surprisingly high success rate.

Lately, Claire Littleton was appointed FEC chair, and since she's a major Libertarian, several other parties objected (full disclosure: my party, the USWP is one of those parties). Now, I like Claire, and I tend to believe she'd have performed her job in that capacity with a minimum of partisanship. However, these parties have refused to give her their lists of candidates and locations due to concern she might help the libertarian party gain electoral advantage.

So far, it actually seems pretty scandalous. Here's the kicker though. While the objecting parties wont give Claire their lists, they HAVE assured her that they have filled every required spot with candidates or blockers, and they have provided these names, in no particular order, for security checks. Thus, everything here is completely fine, all of the required spots have been filled and all necessary security checks are being done.

There. Is. No. Scandal. Here.

Finally, vote for me on Christmas. I'll be running for Congress from Alabama again, and if you appreciate a no-nonsense approach to good government, you'll be glad you sent your vote my way.