V for Victory: Artela for President, Foreign Affairs Update, Taxation

Day 1,991, 13:13 Published in USA USA by Vanek26


Sup America,

The weather has been beautiful out, except if you live in Minnesota, apparently they had a blizzard. The Stanley Cup playoffs have started, best hockey in the world. I guess basketball is in their playoffs as well, but who cares, boring. Hockey is where its at. Anyhow, eRepublik!



Artela has won the primaries of the USWP, Feds, WTP, and I'm told most of the 6th parties, making her the candidate for May. Dr. Luis Senterio won in AMP, while Tenshibo had strong showings and I believe came in 2nd in most of them. Artela will do a good job with the tough foreign affairs storm that is brewing.

I know a lot of people don't like the unity process, but as someone that ran before it, it REALLY isn't that much different, the key was getting party endorsements, same as now. Oblige and Glove, one with 2 good months of being CP and the other with a lot of readers of his paper, were the only people that ever won with less nominations then their opponent to the best of my knowledge. There is a good thread on the forums, here, and I picked out a good post from our resident favorite Aussie, Tim Holtz, about the results of PTO, Liquid Oxygen had a good one as well, I hope you read it. I also noted on the Fed forums that despite the AFA's slow decrease in voting power, it still is not enough to guarantee a win for a non-PTO candidate.



The big event of yesterday was the Resistance War in Saxony. Romanian units led by FAR, the famous military force, I believe one of the oldest in the game, as well as many fighters from Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, USA, Croatia, and many others, liberated the region and cut Poland in two, destroying their economic bonuses. Poland and Germany have a treaty, so Poland will be restored Saxony shortly, but it still is enjoyable to watch a good battle, as well as you can see who believes in what.


Saxony was a perfect example of what Greece, pro-EDEN Romanians, Croatians, can accomplish while fighting against TWO in concert with Bulgarians, Americans, and others. I hope they choose to do more of that in the future. On the other hand, Argentina seems to be shedding the facade that they are pro-EDEN and is openly just anti-CoT, which these days seems to be pro-TWO. Their government shouted to fight for Poland, because 'Germany is pro-CoT so we fight against Germany.' Meanwhile, they have no regions and are wiped. I guess fighting for Poland's bonuses against a country not even in CoT is more important then actually fighting against CoT for you know, their own country. But whatever, to each their own I guess.



Poland losing their bonuses segues into my next topic, taxation! How exciting. So, you might have noticed Evry proposed a law to raise the VAT tax on food. This is an EC experiment to see where on the Laffer Curve we are at in terms of VAT taxes in an effort to raise more revenue. The United States is around 3rd to 4th in total revenue daily, and around 5th in per capita revenue. The top countries in term of revenue are Argentina, Serbia, and we tend to have around the same as Poland, all countries with much higher populations then us. However, none of these countries are above us in per capita taxation, suggesting inefficent taxation compared to us, and the nations above up per capita like Slovenia, Sweden, Chile, and China. If you don't know what the Laffer Curve is, basically as taxation increases, so do revenues until a certain point, where revenue actually decreases since there is less incentive to actually do the work. So by raising the VAT tax 2%, we can see if our revenue responds by going up or down, and thus determine what side of the curve we are on. I'm no expert on the economics, please direct your questions to Kemal Ergenekon, the one with the PhD's on the subject. As for bonuses, it seems to me that bonuses have less of an effect then population on revenue, since Argentina doesn't even have any regions but still has high revenue, but Poland offers us a good example. I've asked the Kemal and folks to pay close attention to Poland's finances over the next few days now that they went from 100/100 bonuses to a mere 30/10, which should shed some light on the economic effects of high and low bonuses. I can tell that you are nodding off, so I'll close with BUELLER, BUELLER...



I'll try to write another article in the next few days to end my term, so hopefully this won't be my last article.

In any case, stay classy America.

V