What Should Congress Do?
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by Leroy Combs
As of Day 1164 over 56 percent of the job offers on the U.S. market were offers of $6.00 USD or less. Why is this so? Any person in the U.S. could get a job for over $13 USD. Why would anyone take a job for $6 USD or less if they could make over $13 USD? Why would a business owner post a job for $6 USD when they knew there were better offers out there?
I'll tell you why - employers are hiring workers at a lower salary so they can donate the balance of their wages to that worker tax free. Workers work for $6 USD, then have the remaining sum donated directly to them. The goal here is to get more money to a worker without having it be taxed. This means less money finds its way to the government, and thus less funds for our country. Will congress do anything about it? We will have to wait and see, although I doubt it.
Think what the U.S. could do if everyone paid their taxes. The thing I hate the most is that the people who can afford it the least are the ones hurt the most. They are the ones who could use the programs designed to help them level up faster. I have heard it said that if we increase the minimum wage we will be hurting our military and militias, who rely on commune style systems. But if we can't increase the minimum wage when we are taking in more USD per day in taxes since well before Christmas, when will we? I think it would be interesting to see how much more taxes we can take in if we make a larger segment of the population pay taxes. Just imagine what a fully funded government could accomplish.
Over the last ten days we have about 21 fewer job offers on the market. Yet the number of job offers below $6 USD stayed the same. Even worse, the job offers for less than $5 and $4 USD both went up.
You can check out the information I used for this article here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AmKQ_J4hCnZGdGJoQWtURzE0czNzTTVyX0pMdjh5cmc&hl=en&output=html
Disclosure: I manage and work in 20 companies. I have one person that I pay by wage donation but his base salary is $9.41 USD per day. Raising the minimum wage will have no effect on what I make in my companies. Imagine what we could do with the extra revenue. There is hope this congress session has just started and maybe something can be done.
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Comments
First denied.
Its a good thing we have people like you still in office. The only people against this are those that have specific self-interests. They will also be the very same ones that troll on here.
Well done LC
You will kill communes, and cause a lot of headaches in the military with this.
Well done, and pretty accurate.
+1
As long as they dont stop letting companies use the monetary market I dont mind at all.
I think the tax evasion is an example that we're to high in the laffer curve, people are evading causing revenues to lower because of the relative price to foreign markets.
I may have read the whole thing wrong, I really only skimmed and did a quick check in.
Read and voted!
>people with self interests are only ones who don't want this
I still don't want it and I only self employ.
Oh and I probably have over 5 offers under 2 USD because I'm too lazy to cancel them.
eh nothing will happen. We barely got the Minimum Wage law passed to up it from 80 cents. Then the admin dropped the economic nuke on us and we had to quickly revert the law.
If we upped the wages again over 5 dollars, it would hurt the Military communes.
What we need to do is considering adjusting our taxes to encourage more people to stop avoiding them. The more people paying means more money for the State.
Communes and Military dictate the Tax Policy. This is where most the Tax money would otherwise go. Let intelligent and dedicated players keep their money. This is the most liberating tax policy in a populist sense. We can all evade the taxes together.
Nay.
Higher wages are also the reason a company is less competitive. It got much bigger cost when employer is paying the job market price salary plus taxes. So basically evading taxes is an economic thing to do.
It's not into the hands of worker, it's into the cost of a final product.
One measure for a state to get more taxes of course is to raise VAT instead of income tax.
We can have a solid min. wage and keep the communes working.
If new people would quit dickin' around with the markets I could pay my employees and myself better. .10 for grain and .70 for q1 food don't leave a ton of margin!
Tax production (company profits) and tax income (wages) equals double taxation.
I think P Oaks has the right idea. Govt. and noob company owners screw it up enough and I'll be running my companies by my self. How much tax money will that rake in? Who's gonna feed the noobs cryin', "We can't find a job! We wanna fight for free!".
I would like to note that the last min wage law change had no effect on current workers, and they kept their old pre min wage wages.
Even with a higher min wage, communes would merely cycle more money back to the gov't which could by cycled back to the communes once again, a slight increase in funding as a portion of increased revenues would probably do the trick.
because it would pretty much ruin a lotta businesses.
real and the nominal minimum salaries are not the same thing, you know ; )
Someone should run the numbers to see how much a 1% VAT, 1% Import tax, and 1% income tax raises for the government. Once these amounts are known, the income tax could be eased down, and minimal import and VAT's could be put into place - without hurting overall tax revenue totals.
I don't mean drastic changes, but a
With the amount of taxes we are taking in right now why not make up the difference in communes?
Oh jeez, not this shit again!
I agree with Jack Jockson that a VAT is the way to go. This will get revenue for the government as company owners have to place their raw material on the market prior to purchasing it for their companies that manufacture the finished product. Communes can be subsidized by the government to replace any losses they may have due to the VAT.
All Taxes can be evaded. Say we put Income Tax at 0% and VAT at 23%, companies owners will start selling on the black market through donations. The real marketplace will be forced to list prices higher than what normal Wage workers can afford. And so noobs will be hurting once again, only this time it will be far more painful.
This game isn't rocket science. The way we have it is by far the easiest method. Smart people will always evade taxes, no point in making it difficult and arcane for the noobs.
**Additional Note to previous post:
RMs might not be able to be sold through donations in the same way, but you can coordinate pretty well selling at .01 and having someone else buy it. And more imporatantly the communes and company owners will still sell to themselves at .01 and effectively evade taxes, leaving the normal business owners and two-clickers with the burden.
I love it. LC, keep on pushing this in Congress. There are tons of supporters that agree with the ideas you have presented here and others, like myself, have pushed elsewhere.
I'd say slash the income tax to 20% and see what happens. This was the level it was at when we fought off the North American invasion during WWIII so this rate wouldn't really cripple us as a lot of the elite have suggested. You might get stimulation of the economy this way because the noobies will have more money to spend!
I'm unsure of the pros and cons of a VAT tax, however raising the minimum wage is NOT the way to go.
%23 TAX IS NOT FAIR
I agree 23% is too high. I want my wage to be worth something.
Why not increase import tax while decreasing income tax? As long as income tax is above %10, it's perfectly fair to avoid it by low salaries plus donations.
raise the minimum wage and lower taxes.
Simple.
Less tax, collect more.
Raise the minimum wage, you destroy all the military communes.
"What should congress do?"
Kill itself. /b/
Good article Leroy. I hope you keep fighting for tax reform, something like 20% Income Tax-5% Import Tax-10% Value Added Tax.
Princefigs, "Its a good thing we have people like you still in office. The only people against this are those that have specific self-interests. They will also be the very same ones that troll on here."
TRUTH!
ya raising the minimum wage will only do good, right? wrong look how far our currency deflated after the last minimum wage hike!
@Azriel no kidding, we went from recommended exchange rate of ~$50 to $323... higher minimum wage rate isn't the way to go
😁^ BS! The Minimum Wage had nothing to do with the exchange rate.
New business owners, that DO NOT understand how markets react, brought the USD down. It has since recovered to all most normal.
These inexperienced GM's bought 'cheap' companies that flooded the market because of Admin's Economic Mod changes. This scared people who were doing poorly anyway.
The Minimum wage was proposed at $4.00 and ended up being only $1.00 (change from $0.80, woo-hoo!) So I guess we'll never know if a minimum wage hike would have helped. (BTW, personally I don't think it would have helped, but that's not the point.)
So get your crap straight ladies & gentlemen.
Sure, make the minimum wage higher, prices of goods go higher. Inflation. Companies will still pay on the sly. Just like people who sell their stuff will do it on the sly as well. Why? because the average player doesn't give a crap about funding new players.. and why should they? Most people who start this game are going to quit, whether or not we provide them food.
Stop taking 23% from everything we earn whether as a salary or as a company and maybe people wouldn't be so prone to find ways to cut government out of the picture completely!
Nice job on the data Leroy. Hats off!
You can count on me to vote for lower taxes across the board and no minimum wage hikes. Any proposed increase will be met with resistance here.
"Stop taking 23% from everything we earn whether as a salary or as a company and maybe people wouldn't be so prone to find ways to cut government out of the picture completely!"
x2
Except... since you've had the taxes so high for so long, everyone has learned how to tax evade, and will probably continue to do so because its just smart business sense. (Who wants to make -less- money if they can keep more of it?)
Me, I just get a kick out of not paying into the oligary's coffers.
Voted
Screw the oligarchy out of theirs. They never pay, so why should we?
Thedillpickl “The Minimum wage was proposed at $4.00 and ended up being only $1.00 (change from $0.80, woo-hoo!) So I guess we'll never know if a minimum wage hike would have helped.”
>>> The $4 minimum wage passed http://eusaforums.com/forum/index.php/topic,1645.0.html then the admins changed the economic module 2 days later. Then the “Doomsayers” http://eusaforums.com/forum/index.php/topic,1918.0.html claimed wages would fall below $4, which in fact never happened.
mccvii “Sure, make the minimum wage higher, prices of goods go higher. Inflation. Companies will still pay on the sly.”
>>> At $4 the minimum wage would not have driven up product prices, but would have curbed some of the tax cheating.
@Harflimon: "RMs might not be able to be sold through donations in the same way, but you can coordinate pretty well selling at .01 and having someone else buy it. And more imporatantly the communes and company owners will still sell to themselves at .01 and effectively evade taxes, leaving the normal business owners and two-clickers with the burden."
If you attempt to sell RMs to yourself at USD.01, you run the risk of somebody else buying it out from under you. Not exactly a sure method of tax evasion.
@Mr. A. Smith, That's exactly my point. $4 min wage passed but never took effect. So we will never know the effect it would have had.
As I've said, I do not believe it would have changed much except for communes.
After looking at http://eusaforums.com/forum/index.php/topic,1918.0.html , I do not even get what they are talking about!
Did anyone LOOK at the job market the last couple of days?!
It is just now settling down and it is NOWHERE close to the $4 min, let alone the $1 min. All these genius' have companies. Perhaps all their friend and hanger-on-ers do not require the adjustment of fair compensation. I pay top prevailing wage. This makes me look at the Job Market everyday.
Again, the ONLY effect $4 could have would be to communes.
Humph!
Then there are people who don't leave in the U.S. at all in order to evade taxes and get higher salaries, like me. Boy if they would return to USA and pay their taxes. Also since attacking is free and we don't have to pay fees to any alliance, the nation uses less Gold than ever. If we cut the hyperactivity and bashing our heads in unimportant wars, we could get rid of the highest income tax in the world and cut it to, say, 15% to increase the overall welfare of our citizens.
About the communes, I honestly don't see why they would die if minimum wage is increased. could someone please explain.
@Snorunt30: All eRep data is bs. Don't believe in them.
Sossu said, "About the communes, I honestly don't see why they would die if minimum wage is increased. could someone please explain.".
The only thing I could see happening is they (communes) would loose a little efficiency. That's why I don't see the big deal about a min wage. The prob I see is noob company owners screwin' with the markets.
And YES, could someone who is knowledgeable about communes please explain how a $4 min wage would affect them???
"After looking at http://eusaforums.com/forum/index.php/topic,1918.0.html , I do not even get what they are talking about!"
That was an non-sponsored proposal made by a non-member of congress without any discussion that led to an unauthorized in-game vote to lower the minimum wages to $1
😁^ Yes, yes, I understand that. I didn't follow their topic of discussion. The thread made no economic sense. They were all prattling on about how the $4 min would cause an economic collapse. Were they for real or just BS'ing?