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You're a lady of loose morals.

voted

WONDERFUL POINT

I'm a Bunny and I approve this message.

Queen of AWESOME!

Paying taxes is never a nice thing. But it is necessary. Take a look around in real life what happens when your citizens don't pay taxes 😉

Economical prosperity?

Greece.

Italy.

>Implying that's not the result of a unstable currency and poor government management (or, as people with intellect would say, government management in the first place ahuea)

Voted and message approved! We need to have a sense of community.

Taxxessssz... taxxezzs... my preciousszz.

All dem shekels! You of all should know how great they are Valnad. The taxes go straight down our pockets to finance our irl parties. Isn't that right?

MUH SHEKELS

Gotta horde the pleb's taxes so I can buy myself another eFerrari, duh.

I feel that we too often fall into the trap of depending on money to solve our problems and to save us from doing actual work. But money does not make a community, people do.

We can max out our tax revenues and throw all that money at our problems, and we can "guilt tax" our big spenders until their credit cards are maxed out. But that doesn't replace the hard work needed to make a large and vibrant community.

We just saw the value of people working their butts off to both end a months-long war and to win a major ATO victory. Give me that type of hard work to create a better community over money any day. And maybe with more of that type of hard work, and less dependance on money to solve problems, we wouldn't need either such high tax rates or such dependence on large donations.

You do realize that we need roughly 200k / month just to keep our MPPs up right? So we do need money to function.

and how did we manage to pay for those in the past? This work tax is fairly new in the grand scheme of things.

Previously we paid those with deficit spending. A bit more than a year ago the governments were making A LOT of money. We talk millions / month. So we had a lot of money saved up. This has gotten us through the spending that has been needed.

For all the money spent on this war, the most important contribution to the war was not money spent on MPPs, money spent on tanks, or money spent on Combat Orders. It was hard-working people like yourself who made a difference that no amount of money could achieve.

For just about every decision we make in eRep we have a choice. We can invest money to achieve a goal, or we can invest hours of work. It is up to us to consider what is the more efficient tool for each task. For too many decisions we have chosen a very unbalanced approach, to invest extremely large sums of money and very little hard work. The state of our society today suggest that strategy was incorrect in the past and would be incorrect to continue.

A little less dependence on money to spend and a little more elbow grease can go a long way to creating a good community into the future. Our shortage of people willing to put work into our community is currently much larger than our shortage of people willing to contribute money either through taxes or donations. Unless the goal is to have a "community" of very few people who have massive amounts of money to spend on themselves.

Don't get me wrong I agree that we need people to work together to get a community. That is what this whole article is about.

But even if we need people to work together we still need money for MPPs. Without a MPP stack, well we're screwed. The money to the MPP stack needs to come from somewhere. Some people seem to think that it's okay to rely on heavy donations just so that they don't have to pay taxes. That's where we have issues right now. We need to tackle this whole issue as a community rather than individuals. Yes, it hurts to pay taxes. We don't pay them because we think it's hilarious. We pay them because they are needed.

I believe we are addressing two very separate points.

But to address your point on MPPs, to treat anything as a sacred cow invites us to make incorrect decisions. We can look at the past few months and easily make the argument that our community could be better off if we had spent less on what we did and invested in other areas that could have built a stronger community. We shouldn't make future fiscal decisions based solely on such revisionist history, but the discussion shouldn't be ignored either.

To address my point, I suspect you would agree that it would have been a good investment if we could have spent more on MPPs. If we had invested more work into building better diplomatic relationships we might have had more allies to sign MPPs with. Our existing MPPs could also have been made into better investments if we could better help our existing allies to be stronger and more committed to fighting for us when we need them. That return on investment is not available by simply investing more money.

Our society currently spends a disproportionate amount of work on how to increase tax revenues, how to spend tax revenues, and debating the correctness of plans for both. Comparatively little time and effort goes into how to increase the amount of work hours that members of society will contribute to making our community better, or to discussion of the best ways to "spend" those hours of work that people contribute. I would feel much better about the community's future if more was written on the latter and less on the former.

voted

This. So much THIS.

Well said.
We made a good arrangement and I hope it will go well, so that we will have our bonuses back soon.
After that we should examine our tax-revenue, have a discussion in Congress see what can be done.

We will only have one or two WRM bonuses. Don't get your hopes that high 😛

I thought it will be 60/40

And this my friends, is why USA refuses to function. Pay your fucking taxes, the more you make the more you should pay.

And btw, the agreement to buy back regions may have been the most pussywipped i've seen a nation getting here in erep. If I were your government, i would have told the enemy to sod of and go grow a pair.

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There's several problems with how people perceive the tax structure though isn't there? Surely nobody actually thinks it is applied evenly to all citizens - what about different company types, not to mention other income sources that a much greater (all the medal golds, and visa gold) that nobody takes even one cent of.

On the other hand, surely you aren't convinced that anyone is making fat profits from companies in game, especially with no bonuses - remember the costs of making the company, and the prices at market of some products often being lower than the cost of production?

By the way, when people disagree with valid reasons that doesn't mean they want to kill your community

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Let's see no taxes, equals no money, which equals a strong community, which equals no MPP's, which equals getting your ass handed to you, OK I think I got it. Learn something new every day.

Raise the import tax.

I replied to you before why this doesn't work.

Raising import tax is not going to bring in the 200k we need. There is a sweet spot with import taxes that generates a maximum amount of profit. Think of it as an exponential function with a peak. Start at 1% tax and go upwards and income will increase until it reaches the peak, after that it will go down again due to the tax hurting people importing. All this will do is create a lack of weapons on the eUS market and increase the price of weapons here. This will actually make us get a reduced income to what we do now as well as making it a lot harder for eUS citizens to get weapons and food to fight with. Meaning that we get less money, the people without Q7 weap and Q5 food factories poorer, and potentially increase the income for the factory owners for awhile until people can't afford it and die off.

and having a high work tax scares away the most productive citizens who would pay more taxes.

I'm not arguing that all revenue can be raised by just import tax, but that raising the import tax slightly would allow for a slightly lower level.

Anyway, your thesis is that "taxes are reasonable at a high level because not paying taxes is not fair and we need CC" assumes that current funding levels are justifiable, that what is currently being funded must be funded.

The current taxes are reasonable. People have just gotten stuck in this state where they don't pay taxes like this due to it not existing earlier.

go ahead raise taxes higher.

Please just stop with your stupid comments. I write nowhere in this article that we should increase taxes. I actually write that they are expected to be lowered sometime soon.

sorry for the misunderstanding. i look forward to lower taxes then. o7

voted

For some reason people think that taxes suck.
I do, but they are necessary in moderation.

How are we going to finance everything without taxes?
You don't, but you can finance less.

How are we going to pay for our MPPs?
With taxes. Just less of them.

Want us to just drop them and go solo?
Of course not.

Want us to have no back up reserve in case shit hits the fan and it's needed?
Reserves are great, but alas, even 10million dollars will not help when shit hits the fan.

Want us to remove USAF which gives us no power at all in foreign affairs?
Yes, remove USAF. Pay COs and Civ MU with a portion of the funding.

Our taxes paid for the surrender payment. So the question is were we asked if we wanted our taxes to go to spoland? I dont think you did.

You get to chose between these offers:

1. Spend 6m+ to fight Poland for our country. This does not have a 100% chance of winning. This might lead to that we are bankrupt and wiped without a way to get back on the map.

2. Stay wiped. This costs the citizens more than the current tax does and hurts the country even more as retention of new players become a lot harder.

3. Pay 1m to get 60/40 bonuses back with the potential to boost that up to 100/60. This will increase the income of our citizens extremely much and essentially pay back the taxes that they have paid rather quickly.

I fail to see how option 3 is the least favorable option.

Actually we got to choose from none of the above. From the raising of the work tax to the complete surrender all was done behind closed doors. Then the policies are passed on to the citizens way after the fact.
Maybe just maybe if some of you try to explain things up front the population would have a clearer understanding. The lack of transparency in this government is terrible. You want a community then fine ,but it is a two way street. Start opening up more to the people, let us have some sort of idea what is going on. Oh and by the way winning is never 100% ever. We will never know if number 1 was right or wrong.
Since there never was a plan to go that route. The bottom line you want more of a community then become a better serving government. It is probably more important now then before.I'd be more than willing to help out however I can by the way

I hope you realize that we can't leak information like this out to the public before it is done. It was handled in all the proper channels. People choose congress, congress votes for stuff like this. This was all voted in the congress and they had full access to the deal when they voted for it. There is a time for things to be discussed in the open, and a time for when the congress and executives have to make a decision.

Congress work is not about pleasing the crowd, it is about maintaining the welfare of the country. If the congress were there to please people we'd see minimum taxes, the congress throwing all the saved up money out on everyone and not thinking about the future. And trust me, that'd end up badly.

Important decisions like whether to raise voter's taxes or surrender can't be shared with the voters before an election, silly. If you did, they would never vote for you. It's best to assume you know better than the taxpayer, do what you want behind closed doors, and hope they've forgotten about it by the election.

Whatever you missed my point entirely. I never asked Congress to please the crowd in the least. I asked the government to be more transparent, there is a big difference. There is a way of communicating with the people without giving away all your big secret stuff. But you all refuse to even consider that.

How is this government not transparent? Do give some points.

Ok heapseppo. Congress members are supposed to voted by the constituents. So yes you need to have a vote by the country . All you elitists voted on it and said screw the little guy basically. Well that just dont work. You people always get what you want since you control everything. Alot of people did not want surrender. But you guys always do what you want anyways so whats stopping you now.

And a lot of people don't think about the greater good of the country. What do you think happens to new players if we are wiped? How does the economy of everyone get effected by it? How does this effect our alliance and friends? How does it effect us in the long run? Answer those questions.