The Art of Eating Babies: A modest 20% tax proposal
Azarius Theron
The Art of Eating Babies: A modest 20% work tax proposal for preventing the poor new players in eCanada from being a burden on old players or country, and for making them beneficial to publicly funded wars
Musical theme: Hungry Face by Mogwai
There has been a lot of griping in the media lately from miserly players about a ‘failed’ work tax. Before that, the complaints were from elite payers about having to pay for wars out of their own pockets. Before that, the complaints were from the raving warriors about how boring eCanada was without its own wars. And before that, eCanada simply had Rylde to contend with.
The base problem at the root of that cycle of discontent is a lack of money. With enough resources, eCanadians would be productively engaged in reshaping the New World to their liking, gobbling up whatever resource bonuses they desire, which in turn would make them more money, and so the cycle upwards towards wealth, happiness, and freedom from boredom would be assured.
But how can eCanada tap into its hidden reserves of cash that can unlock this prosperous and glorious future? Quite simply, the future is in your babies.
Right now you’re doing it wrong. New player assistance programs and mutually beneficial communes and other such hand-holding schemes are draining eCanada of resources that would be better directed towards funding wars and keeping the real warriors happy. Face it, the clash of Division 4 titans is the main event and Division 1-3 is just window dressing to give new gold-buyers a reason to start playing. Why waste your time and money trying to grow babies when you should be directly feeding your true fighters instead? It is time to start culling the herd of hapless new players and misguided WAMers and using their tax dollars to fund the real fights.
baby, do you even lift those gloves?
It is good to sacrifice the young and foolish when you expect no future. This has been the general business model for eRep anyhow: cultivate a strong early community and then reap away at what’s been sown. Many agree the game is dying so there is no harm in hastening certain parts of it to your advantage.
You can see this decline in the number of new players who rise to leadership roles in eCanada. Take a look around. eCanada is raising up fewer babies into political leaders. Cabinets vary little from one candidate to the next. eCanada’s social/political climate has matured and the strength of its established players is where the only real growth occurs.
New players that happen to keep playing do so because they like the military module of the game (not the political, economic, or media/social modules). These clickers have little voice in the game, so you will barely notice their diminished numbers. Because they will barely complain and will instead vote with their feet by leaving the country or game entirely, there is little political damage in chowing down on the meaty bits of their worker tax.
In eCanada, there should be no shame in pursuing a proper diet
Self-sufficiency and profitable business is old news. With the many gold rewards from battles, the real money is in fighting wars (read Elite Druid’s article for a clearer picture on this). Unfortunately, wars cost money. Private donors can provide this money, yet why ask prominent fighters to give more when they should be investing their efforts in combat. Public donors can provide this money through war bonds and similarly organized programs, yet it will require public confidence and the bond credibility. Better yet, unwitting and unwilling donors can provide this money through taxes. There’s no pandering to fickle egos or trusting in war bonds; it’s just a click’n’collect format with little hassle to manage.
Now a brief word from our sponsors:
This 20% Work Tax message is endorsed by 2014’s Top Tater, simulare, who agrees we need to go all in or gtfo altogether
Of all the click’n’collect taxes, Work Tax offers the greatest short-term reward. Import taxes already generate little income and imports dry up quickly when taxes go up. VAT should bring in the big bucks, but the problem is that it’s just too easy to buy elsewhere with lower prices. Work Tax has a captive taxpayer because the majority of people won’t change citizenship just to save a few bucks, and if you’re lucky, new players who barely understand the game won’t even see they are paying 20% per click.
There are three types of fare on the Work Tax platter:
1. Top sirloin steak -- So far you’ve been milking the WAMers out of a few tax dollars each day, which has not been a bad arrangement. Nevertheless, self-sufficient players who have played for a long time have developed a robust number of companies from which large cuts of meaty tax can be gained. The downside is that they’ve grown wiser over the years, making them a tough steak for the taxman to dine on. Quite simply, such cattle will simply shut down production when they see the math no longer adds up. Does that mean they’ll begin purchasing from the market again, offering up smaller morsels of sales tax to fatten the country’s belly? Not necessarily so, since they’re not a captive consumer, and will purchase from whatever market gives them the best deal.
2. The casual two-clucker – on again, off again, maybe purchasing the odd booster pack, yet likely just pecking away on free clicks and an easy income from the job market. Think of these as the poultry of the tax bounty. The best idea would be to raise them over the long term for a regular supply of eggs. The downside is that only a small percentage from workclicks will allow taxman to collect a steady number of these easy eggs. We all know real fighters don’t get ripped on eggs; it takes tasty chicken to build muscle. As we also all know, eRep is better geared toward headless chickens, and so you should follow Plato’s lead on this one. Jacking up the WT to 20% is akin to dragging out the ol’ chopping block. When the two-cluckers cash runs short, they won’t be sticking around. That’s a sure decapitation. But by then eCanada will have reaped the rewards of culling the clickers and great wars will be sure to follow.
3. The other white meat -- more tender and more nourishing than the two-cluckers is the veal of eCanada. These are the players who drop in to the game on a whim, play for a short time, living a miserable life pent up in a small box of fulfilling Plato’s starter missions. They have no knowledge about the greater game beyond that box, where the ‘second life’ of eRep comes alive on forums and shouts and PM threads. These players will never venture into such pastures and will simply die off with little consequence unless you make use of their futile existence.
As the tax tenders of eCanada, it is your job to see that the gold pumped into new players from easy early missions can fatten them for the killing you’ll make on a 20% Work Tax. It is only fitting the real warriors dine on the finest meat as they ride to victory in wars funded by these most deliciously edible veal babies.
In their short and miserable lives, the only useful thing they can give you is a meal ticket to the next True Patriot feast. They have no understanding of the difference between a 5% or 20% Work Tax. They offer no social or political advantage. They are expendable and renewable as long as fresh blood registers each day.
Indeed, the true holy grail in this game has always been the elusive baby boom. The greatest leader that eCanada can ever know will be the one that pairs 20% WT with the cornucopia of a veal boom for eCan’s veteran players. It’s a match made in heaven for the eDinosaur’s diet. With a simple 10% increase, you will already be halfway to that paradise and the other half is sure to follow
Comments
fyi: You’ll find no hard totals or clear forecasts in this article, because I don’t believe in numbers when doing taxes. Eating babies is more of an emotional feeling than a calculated tax table setting.
If you happen to care about questions like “How much revenue is enough?” or “How big should our war chest be?” consider shouting:
http://tinyurl.com/ps7lk9j
I actually like this idea and it would be paired well with a facebook ad specifically targeting Canadians.
Maurice the Moose Demands your 1st born and 20% ?
Taxes have almost no importance unless you are a company owner.
When I say company owner, I mean someone with many, many companies operating each day. If you have one little company like myself (Q5 food) only producing on your own work, than the tax doesn't matter at all. It does worlds for the country, but on your own expense it's practically irrelevant.
Now how many people in Canada are actually company owners? I'm not entirely sure, but they are the few people posting long posts about why they dislike the tax. Using actual numbers and data. For the rest of us, it is a completely negligible cost.
and that is okay because you dont pay for it....
Yeah I don't care. I might care more if I had a bunch of companies but even then it's just some silly game so I probably wouldn't care much.
Too many companies to operate in eCanada...
If you even remotely think that a 20% work tax would be benificial to eCanda you don't understand the game mechanics. 5 days into the increase from 5% to 10% and there is already a decrease in work tax collected when compared between the last 3 days. And the average salary has dropped some as well. You take the work tax to 20% and people who hire people will drop employee wages to minimum wage and pay them directly, in order to lower the average salary. The greed that this eGov is expressing all in the name of war funding...amazing how disrespectful of eCanadians. Find better ways to fund the wars. Others do, look at ePoland as an example, they have low taxes and lots of players, why do they have lots of players, because the eNation takes care of their eCitizens. When the eGov of eCanada abuses people they move or become inactive...I urge you all to stop following bad math and disrespectful leadership!
I could read this guy's stuff for hours.... HEY! DMV: you say you spent 600,000 bucks of your own money on that war...... you kookoo ???? you could have spent it paying this guy to produce fantastic stuff for us to read and talk about and..... Not too Swift are ya??
Getting paid CC would make it feel like actual work.
...but for 600k in real dollars, I'd be more than happy to keep plagiarizing ideas from the greats for years to come. Maybe Kafka next?
I'm taking this as a parody type article because it's hilarious to think 20% might even happen , Congress nearly had a collective nervous breakdown over 10%.
The reality is that eCanada and all of eRep has a high new player mortality rate (might explain why only 200 people vote out of 600=new players who quit). Therefore, it makes sense to find ways to recover some of that free gold and CC generated by new accounts (they earn A LOT very quickly) before they go inactive.
If they follow the missions, new players will build a few companies and get a job, so that will generate extra revenue if the WT is higher. If there were a baby boom, it would be very wise for the government to max out the Work Tax to capture all that new wealth. To offset this, it would be good to create new player assistance programs that would return the benefit of that increased revenue.
It makes sense to tax those who will likely die off and then give something back to the much smaller number of new players who look for help and will contribute to eCanada. Of course, the war chest would take a larger piece of that pie, I'd imagine.
That scenario applies for the short-term benefit of a baby boom but would it work in the situation we have now? Probably not because the Work Tax affects the mid-range players, too, and we're still trying to see what effects the 10% tax will have.
But I am quite serious that over-taxing new players would benefit eCanada if older players put in the hard work of running well-funded assistance programs. Sounds good on paper but probably too labour intensive for this game.
Wasn't there a scandal back in the day when CAF was giving preferential treatment by taking from the new players and giving more to the heavy hitters...
Sounds a bit like real life...
I got an idea!
Let's all go do something else for awhile and come back in 6 months to see if this pos is still on-line.
The guy who wrote this article knows so much he has only earned ONE Hardworker Medal since he joined the game in November 2014...and he has only managed to get ONE Super Soldier Medal...Amazing what garbage can be written. This dude can't even be considered a 2-clicker.
I think he meant this as a satirical piece....
Yeah, after looking over his player information he may only be satirical...The guy doesn't both to play either...
So both you know why, he started a new account primarily to use as an easy way to stay in touch with friends he has in eRep. He's only recently felt any need to participate in the game.
Just reviewed yer profile. We've both started playing about the same time. Be careful slinging crap about, compared to me you look like a n00b. How the hell can you be D3? I was never D3, when the division thing happened I was immediately put in D4. Me thinks you don't fight. Also you've only been in congress twice? Me thinks you don't do politics either.
Just so you know, the guy you're bitchin' about is a friend of mine. Did you ever consider to ask where he came from, why he has opinions? Well let me answer your unposed question, it's a new account. D'oh
just goes to show that a profile with low levels and medals is not necessarily inexperienced or unworthy of listing to....also works the other way were just because someone has a lot of medals and high level does not mean he has anything of merit to stay....
And how much real money have you spent on the game, cause I have not spent any real money. I did everything you see in my profile without paying the developers.
And if your friend wants to half play a game that's fine and he wants to be sytarical that fine. But if he wants to be taken seriously.
My time served in congress was before the new system. Since the new eGov module I have not been in a party that gets congressmen/women.
I fight the DO everyday when i can, and I work and train everyday. For a while.
PS new accounts are fine, but if you can only bother to log in and work 30 times in 8 months...I don't know, that doesn't seem all that active to have a grasp of what is going on ingame. But, that's just IMO.
When I borrowed the premise of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and published it in "Social interactions and entertainment," I figured people would not take this too seriously and a few might be mildly amused at the backwards thinking in this article.
What I didn't expect was to gain some perspective on the subject. I was against raising the Work Tax because I supported players who are relying on in-game wealth to get ahead, rather than using purchased gold. But then, I started to see that players who voluntarily give money for wars need to be given some support by the community who benefits from the boost in activity/medals/weapon purchases. So, it is a necessary evil to tax WAMers and new players struggling to grow, so long as the money is spent wisely and new players get some assistance.
OLloyd is right in pointing out that I didn't come to that realization by being involved in working companies and fighting in battles, because my only real activity lately has been to follow the media discussions very closely. Yes, it's not a fully informed opinion. But, I can see that there's needs to be a compromise between people who want wars at any cost (even if it wipes eCanada) and those who take a more moderate approach, perhaps giving up fights to WAM and don't mind completing DOs for allies.
This article doesn't offer a solution. It just reflects and exaggerates the awkward tension between different viewpoints in eCanada. If anything, I would have expected DMV and Thedillpickl to disagree with the satire and those against the tax to be amused, considering what Swift was trying to do in "A Modest Proposal" (maybe the tone of my article was flawed):
http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/swift/proposal1.html
As for my activity, I've tried to quit the game numerous times and keep getting drawn back by the ongoing storyline. The war and economy module don't have that allure, unfortunately.
Lord.Beorn. "... just because someone has a lot of medals and high level does not mean he has anything of merit to stay...."
So true.
OLloyd "And how much real money have you spent on the game, cause I have not spent any real money. I did everything you see in my profile without paying the developers."
Too damn much money, that's where the pissing and moaning started, I've had enough and refuse to flip the bill. Now I get people mad when I mention that I spent money on the game. They tell me I'm full of myself. Funny when I was spending $100 US or more a month they never bitched. lolololol
Also, a tip of the hat to you for your accomplishment. I know of a few who also have done the impossible and played our "free browser game" without paying for it.
Azarius Theron "If anything, I would have expected DMV and Thedillpickl to disagree with the satire"
I'm still contemplating that baby in the cage that's hanging from the window sill. Quality idea actually, if the baby became too raucous one could simply close the window. Feeding would also be simplified. Makes me wonder if a patent has been applied for.
You wouldn't think it would be an actual product but apparently that invention has already been patente😛
"In the 1930s, London nannies lacking space for their young ones resorted to the baby cage. It's exactly what it sounds like: a creepy wire contraption, patented in the U.S. in 1922, that lets you claim that space outside your city window for your infant."
from: http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1991915_1991909_1991746,00.html
Not sure if anyone noticed but that picture also had an embedded link to another music video by Mogwai.