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Applause for players who have recently been discussing the government’s economic situation. My miscellaneous contributions follow.
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First something which, even though well known, may assist a few.

VAT and ImportTax stack and are applied to products sold on the market. The amount of tax paid to government is a percentage OF THE AMOUNT RECEIVED BY THE SELLER (the TicketPrice):

TicketPrice = MarketPrice / (1+TotalTax)

So if the VAT is .01 and Import tax is .10 ---- TotalTax is .11 and the TicketPrice on a $100 article is:
100/1.11= 90.09

The amount of tax is therefore 100-90.09 = 9.91 or 11% OF the amount received by the vendor (TicketPrice).
You do NOT determine tax revenue by multiplying the tax rate against the MarketPrice.

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Apart from the disastrous suggestion about import tax, which has been abandoned, current suggestions for tax change include:

1. Raise the minimum wage from 1 to 2 dollars. Comment: If every one of the 300 active players in the country were working at minimum wage the country would see a daily increase in revenue of:

300x 1 x .05 = $15 (assuming the communes in which these 300 players work remain open)


2. Lower work tax from 5 to 4 percent.

Comment: This would affect most of our revenue which is about $10,000 per day. Conservatively, 80% of total revenue is from work tax. The effect of reducing the work tax rate by one percent is therefore 10,000 x -.20 x .80 = $1,600 per day
(It is possible but highly unlikely that lowering work tax could encourage additional WAMing, thus slightly reducing the daily revenue loss. )

CONCLUSION: Neither of those things, alone or together, is useful for us.

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Some sure fire ways to increase government revenues are obtaining additional bonus regions, increasing population and increasing the velocity of market transactions. Passing the hat has also been successful. All of those things spell war, war, war, Rylde. The objective of our tax policy should therefore be to arm the community with the financial resources to wage war. That requires, as the first step, setting concrete goals: how much is needed and for what and when – how much do we need to contribute to reserves. Once you have those numbers you can turn to ask “where exactly is the money going to come from”.


This is about budgeting of course and it isn’t all doom and gloom. A good budget is a fantastic tool which occasionally gives us the wonderful feeling that all is well. That may be the present situation in eCanada. It may be that “how much is reasonably needed” equals the amount we can reasonably expect to receive without adjustment. That shouldn’t stop us from considering change, especially in the area of reserves, but it reduces the reflexive desire to change just for change’s sake.