The Economist ~ Work Tax revisited

Day 3,811, 09:35 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313
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Dear friends,

Today we’re going to take a second look at work tax, and more specifically what it can tell us about the world economy. Following my “world without WAM” article, I had a lot of messages saying that WAM (Working as Manager) was now the primary source of tax income for most countries, and that the economy wouldn’t survive a switch. That is true and it isn’t, because workers do get taxed, and without WAM everything would have to be done by workers. Wages would therefore rise, as would prices, and ultimately everything would more or less balance back out again.

However it did make a good point. Today Work Taxes provide a huge amount of income for all countries. Every time a citizen clicks work, they are taxed. If they worked in their own country, the government gets 100%. If they worked abroad in a foreign-based holding company, the government gets 20% (and the foreign government 80😵. If they worked in their country, but it’s occupied… well it gets tricky. The way occupied country “income” is calculated takes into account more than just WAM it seems.

Work tax: the costs

In any case, I decided to look at it again. Firstly, let’s narrow it down to the thirty biggest economies in terms of their WAM output. Let’s look how much it costs to work in each country each time you click work. Remember, this is based on the work tax as a percentage of the median wage for that country, as calculated by the admins.







As you can see there is a fair bit of difference between the cheapest and most expensive countries to work. Even comparing say, Romania and Poland, the tax is around 4cc different, which is not a small amount of money considering the profits on Q4 WRM can be as low as 9-11cc under normal circumstances.

Median wages

Apart from the work tax rate itself, the amount you are taxed is based on the median wage over the past 30 days. So let’s look at that next.







Most active countries have higher median wages due to a busier job market. There are some exceptions- Slovenia has a very low median wage, presumably due to commune usage in the country. That counterbalances somewhat the very high (8😵 tax rate. An 8% tax rate in Slovenia is equivalent to a 5% tax rate in Bulgaria due to the big difference in median wage rates. As a general rule, countries with low (below 300) median wages should have higher tax rates to compensate.

Economic output

National income has a number of sources. Work tax from citizens is one of them, as is income from occupied territories (which includes more than just work tax), donations, CO taxes, working taxes (which is slightly different), VAT and gold medal taxes. There are also various drains on income. Calculating all of this is impossible with the tools the admin has given us, so I haven’t tried.

As a simple measure of the core productivity of each country, I’ve calculated the work tax income, divided this by the “cost to work” numbers above, to give a rough idea of the WAM output of each country. As stated above, this is not accurate and doesn’t pretend to be. Factors which throw this out are:

1. Citizens working abroad and only contributing 20%
2. Foreigners working at home and only contributing 80%
3. Income from occupied regions (which is calculated strangely)

With a few exceptions though, this does not have an enormous effect on most countries. The exceptions being those countries currently wiped/mostly wiped, and those countries where due to recent and likely unsustainable conquests, large portions of their income originate abroad. In any case, these figures are indicative if not definitive, and to avoid frustration and argument I will call this the Economist Output Index and like all great indexes, fudge the figures a bit.



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The remaining 40+ countries add up to a total economic output (on the index) of 11266.


Alliances

Next we can look at the three current alliances of any significance. Pacifica is currently much weakened due to the occupation of the US, but it is interesting that it is more of a rival for Asteria than Andes is.







And a straight comparison of the three:



And finally for a bit of fun, Asteria and (broadly) pro-Asteria vs the world. Obviously what counts as pro-Asteria is very much subjective, and Asteria itself does not recognise any such group (only its ‘friends’, which generally is indicated by an Asterian MPP stack).



As you can see, five of the six most productive countries are Asteria or pro-Asteria. In addition, because of their military dominance, Asteria and Pro-Asteria nations are also more likely to have additional income from occupations. Military power aside, this puts them in an incredibly strong position.

Conclusions

This is not meant to be, as I said, an accurate way of assessing country economic output. But despite the known inaccuracies, it serves to show in broad strokes which countries produce the most, and how that affects the global political scene. Cicero famously said that the sinews of war are infinite money, and it is true that war is incredibly costly. Therefore whichever alliance can command the most wealth will, for the most part, win the war. Gold buyers can skew the odds somewhat, but taxation is still the main source of income for most countries.

I hope you’ve found the article interesting, and I welcome your comments below.

Iain




Thank you’s

Many, many people endorsed my last article. A lot of them were Croatians, who understandably enjoyed an article about their country. However there were also endorsers from other countries, many of which do not see eye to eye with Croatia. I want to thank those people most of all. In ancient Greece they had a concept called arete, which broadly translated means nobility or goodness. It is the idea that you should always be the better person, try to be objective and congratulate your opponent when he defeats you. Those enemies of Croatia who could congratulate them on their victory displayed arete and I salute you.