[Shawtyl0w for CP] My plans for January
Shawtyl0w
Dear citizens of the Netherlands,
In my last article I announced that when I become president of the Netherlands there would be changes. In the mean time the opposing candidate Weekstrom has published his article. I advice you all to read it carefully.
My plans for the Netherlands do not differ from Weekstroms but the underlying reasoning is much different. These are my agenda points.
- Restart a debate in Congress to leave the Hydra Alliance. When accepted I will start a referendem this term.
- Find a solution to the money pit that currently is the government programs.
- Evaluate the eNL allegiances and friends.
Like Weekstrom I believe our time as a member of the Hydra should come to an end. Not because of enemy threats or because of our allies losing wars but for the future of eNL. When we joined Hydra I was hessitend leaving our friends in Orion behind. We the eNetherlands were a small country with virtually no firepower that had no business being part of larger alliances. However the impact of Hydra on eNL has been amazing. We managed to grow as a country. We enjoyed more TWs than ever. International operations bring excitement as well as headaches. Still we were weak and could not help our allies as much as I would like. The fruits of us joining Hydra are clear. We still have an active community with figthers quickly climbing the Legend ranks. Before soon we will have several Legend XXs and will double, triple and even quadruple our ground firepower.
Nevertheless, Hydra has been a near dead alliance eversince the ban wave that hit the Republic of Macedonia particularly hard. Hydra HQ was virtually non-existant. Our contribution to Hydra has always been active politicians and tight friendship. However with the decline in activity I feel we have very little to contribute in terms of being a member of the alliance. I believe we can offer the same while being their friend and remove a target off our backs which is the name of the alliance.
Eversince the change of allegiance of Weekstrom from Pro- Asteria to Pro- Code we have seen basically 40% of our countries total power figthing against the other 60% when it comes to helping our Hydra Alliance friends. This is not fair to our allies. It's sad that one person has so much influence on our battle damage but being a small country that is something that can't be changed in a day.
I believe the future of eNL should be found with our long term allies, new friends through TWs and old relations that have been rekindled. What this means is that everyone who is kind to eNL has the chance to become our friends and we will always help our friends. In pactice this means our TW partners and best allies (currently still mostly Pro-Asterian) will receive our help. It is up to other countries to earn our trust and friendship while we continue to build stronger and new friendships ourselves as well.
We have the opportunity to become a production paradise in the right circumstances. I wish to look into ways to make that happen again. We will need to find a way to fund our gov peograms as well as stay safe from enemy attacks. We can do so by building an economical countey with foreign investors. (e.g. in the air industry). When setup correctly we should be able to allow a high production not throwing away too much taxes due to gsme mechanics.
I want to go back to the drawing board when it comes to our allies. Currently mostly pro-Asterian it is clear who we will fight for even when we decide to leave the Hydra alliance. Those who where there for us have our respect. I do not wish to pro-actively seek a new alliance for our country. I think we should get ourselves sorted first. I know our allies will not like reading this but I'm thinking of the future of eNL and believe this is the way to go.
Signed,
Shawtyl0w
Party President of Democratisch Nederland
Comments
In what sense are our government programs a money pit? We're not spending more than we're getting in income, at least not while we have all our cores under friendly control. Yes, we're spending most of our income on those programs, but that's also for lack of a better way to use our funds... Just saving money doesn't really help either, so aiming for a balance between income and expenses makes sense.
I think if you want to reduce spending on our current programs, you should probably introduce different programs. Right now we'd definitely be capable of spending 100k NLG on a "fun" budget, but if you want something more substantial, there'd definitely need to be budget cuts somewhere...
And obviously, if we'd have more income - like we had in the past with concession deals - we could even spend way more on these government programs. But after that income disappeared we did the wise thing and scaled down the programs so that we could almost keep our budget in check. Congress approved some overspending initially, but the last few months, we're doing great without such overspending.
Currently we rely on the monetary market. Which is fine with current gold prizes and you being actively working it. But it is not fixed sustainable income like e.g. with concessions.
I think it depends on your definition of sustainable. The MM seems pretty stable, so it has been a predictable source of income over a few months. And the way we budget, we take into account only income that has already been realized, instead of calculating based on expected profits.
Also, even without the MM we're above a million in income over the last term. So I would say that the current level of spending on our programs is quite sustainable *as long as* we have all of our cores under friendly control. Each core region provides us with over 200k in income, and especially West-NL is very important for our tax income. If that region is under enemy occupation, we lose most of our income, as people can no longer work as managers in the food industry there, and production bonuses are too low for company managers to make a profit.
Note that I stress "as long as" for a reason. It has not been self-evident for the past couple of months, and we're lucky to be in a relatively peaceful time right now. But indeed the question here as well is, is this sustainable?