Feature Idea: Tax Revenue Breakdown
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by Major Lee Hung
In the real world, when a government is creating their budgets, they will look at things such as what money comes from where. How much is being made from VAT? How much National Insurance are we bringing in? How much of this money can we spend elsewhere.
Unfortunately on eRepublik, governments have little to go off. It's almost impossible to tell how much we're making from VAT, how much we're making from income tax and which tax policies will be most effective to increase our revenue.
Problems Caused by no Revenue Breakdown
-Unable to create a fully effective tax policy
-Only daily/weekly/monthly/average tax income figures to go off when creating a monthly budget
-Creating forecasts for the future is extremely difficult
-Keeping track of the economic health is somewhat more difficult
-Scaling things such as military expenditure to being within our means is much more difficult
My Idea: How it Would Work
On the Economy tab of a country, there should be a table at the bottom. This table will list our VAT revenue, sales tax revenue and donations for the previous day. This would update at around 01:00 game time to minimise load on the servers at day change.
This information would be visible to anybody, allowing aspiring citizens to do things such as create articles on their nation's finances, or allow future/current governments to create and adjust their budgets.
With this extra information at hand, governments can be much more prepared and financially efficient in the future, it will add a lot more depth to the economic module.
Post any suggestions for this idea in the comments! Vote if you think it should be implemented.
Thanks for reading,
Joshua Whelan
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Comments
If you head over to the eUK forums you will see the tax issue being discussed.
The way the game works is what decides the taxes income and no amount of making it visible to everyone will change that
I think you missed the point of the article - Being able to see what we're making from which taxes each day will late us create better tax policies and more efficient forecasts for each term.
When you have a game that means anyone with a decent amount of cash doesn't pay tax there isn't much you can do to change the income with policies
Showing our daily income[day per day] is a good idea, but for security reasons, probably best to only release the figures for 3 days or so before the present day.
But as said above, a lot of people avoid taxes, but still doesn't knock the fact that we can display the daily income to the public. It was done before, I suggested it to Emergy and while he was MoF, it was shown. Now its not.
actually Joshua .. the Govt IRL can only estimate how much VAT is raised [as it requires goods & services being purchased] from the previous year's receipts. Even NI or Income Tax is based on the previous year's returns so could be wildly different from plan if people are laid off or fiddle their taxes [á la Jimmy Carr et al] so eRep tax revenue is quite like RL really
Plus if our finances were published publically, then other countries would know just how bankrupt we are....
We're one of the only countries where the budget isn't public.
@MrKnee: Everyone knows how bankrupt we are anyway. Its no secret.