[Talon] UK Doesn't Want Tax Decrease
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by Talon Karrde
Don't mind the tabloid headline- we're here to deliver you the results of a poll!
Hello and welcome to Beta-Karrde😛
olls! This is a new project by Talon Karrde and Betafoxtrot, which we are starting in the absence of work this month after BigAnt won the election, casting us into the abyss and leaving us with a hole that used to be taken up by our government work over the last two months. What we’re aiming to do with this is to get your opinions on things so that we can present them to the eUK and the government so that we may actually give our citizens a voice, in a lovely, well-presented article format!
So, as this is are debut article, here is a little bit about how we did this poll and how we’ll do it from here on out providing this goes as well as we hope it would. A random selection of 10% of people from each party has been PM’d with a link to the poll and a little explanation about it. We chose 10% as it’s a good amount of people to PM, the percentage means we get a good spread of opinions based on the amount of people affiliated with each party and the number of people messages is a good sampling number. People were randomly messaged so that we could get a good cross section of newer and older players too, so that the poll isn’t weighted unfairly one way or another. Included in the poll were 3 control questions so that we could make it fair.
The first poll sent out has a few questions on it and these are:
-Our current rate of VAT, or Value Added Tax, is 10%. Do you think this level should be changed?
-Our current rate of Income Tax is 5%. Do you think this level should be changed?
-What stance on war would you like your government to take?
-We recently joined an alliance of countries called TWO. Do you support our membership in this alliance?
Below we will show you how people have voted, and give our own opinion on the results!
The Control Questions
These questions are designed to make sure a good sample is taken, that all viewpoints and age groups are represented, to try and make sure our poll gives an accurate representation of the opinions of our citizens.
What party do you belong to?
We have a nice cross-section here and roughly in proportion to the countrywide numbers too. There are slightly less responses from UKPP than we’d like but after an extra round of PMing to rectify that problem we still don’t have the responses from them, so we’re publishing as is. In an ideal world we’d have more from them but if they don’t read and respond to their mails, hey that’s life.
How long have you been playing erepublik?
Again we have a nice cross section here, and if you look at egov this is pretty much in proportion with the age of the citizens in the country as a whole. This tends to suggest our results won’t be biased by age and are accurate in this way.
Our current rate of VAT, or Value Added Tax, is 10%. Do you think this level should be changed?
Just under 3/4 of the respondents don’t want tax lowered. Since this is ultimately down to congress it might be interesting to see if their opinions match this, or if they’ll take heed of what the public are saying here. Some common sense is obviously taken here since only one person wanted a 1% VAT rate. An outright majority of people want to maintain the status quo here too, with over 50% voting for the current level.
Our current rate of Income Tax is 5%. Do you think this level should be changed?
Interestingly even less people want income tax lowered than VAT, and again an outright majority wanting to maintain the status quo.
What stance on war would you like your government to take?
The way this question was phrased, with more than one option available to be ticked, shows some interesting stuff. It seems everyone agrees that we should have war, and just under half of the population wants to make sure we aren’t in any danger if we do so.
About 60% would rather we were friendly and had only training wars, and the other 40% would rather we were more aggressive and attacked a neighbour. The follow-up question to this had mainly calls to attack France or Ireland, with one or two for Canada or Germany and one suicidal person wanted to attack the USA.
We recently joined an alliance of countries called TWO. Do you support our membership in this alliance?
This one was nice and simple- a supermajority support our alliance with TWO and it’s great to see! Thankfully, if this is anything to go by, we made the right decision joining TWO.
Finally, we asked what you want to see in the polls next time- please post below if you have any suggestions!
Thanks for reading our debut article, if there's the interest we are willing and able to conduct more polls to present so that we can take the eUK in the right directions!
As said, if anyone has any ideas for what other polls we should do please post below, and remember to vote, subscribe, comment and shout!
Cheers,
Betafoxtrot & Talon Karrde
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Comments
Your graphs are cut up, I can't read the labels.
No to the tax decrease x2
o7
Good work though, I'll post this on the congress thread.
No to the tax decrease!
I voted in this survey. Did you? : P
Nice work!
'In an ideal world we’d have more from them but if they don’t read and respond to their mails, hey that’s life.'
I'm sure they read em, whether they feel the need to participate in your stunts is another matter.
@Thomas- it was a random sample so I'd assume a lot of people won't have. A public poll is prone to error unless everyone gets a chance to answer.
Nope I didnt vote because I didnt get a PM. So one in ten was questioned and that is a fair assumption? I'm not one for polls because again you are ignoring the more accurate larger poll...the election result where EVERYONE was allowed a say, just four days ago in fact. Of course we could ignore that because the candidate you both favoured lost so I took a poll of four people and all four favoured Big Ant's policy...thats 100% of those polled.
yet another poll where I have not been asked 🙁 Still it's nice to see those two not getting bore😛)
I know, I was just finding out who else participated : D
Ooooh and cast into the abyss? Big Ant said only one TUP member applied for a Government job...I'll leave that for people to read into that what they want O7
>implying people vote according to policy
I fail to see how asking that mixture produced them results, UKPP and NE did their own individual polls are we saw results of 90+% voting for a decrease in tax and rightly so.
Just doesn't add up?
BA
Surely the tax issue was a big enough issue to swing voters at the election though?
I don't know BA, but I can even give an exact list of who was asked, and who responded if needed. I think a couple of you need to read up on polls, sampling and statistics too, I'm confident the method used here will give an accurate result.
The nasty party strikes again.
You lost, get over it
I fail to see how asking that mixture produced them results, UKPP and NE did their own individual polls are we saw results of 90+% voting for a decrease in tax and rightly so.
Just doesn't add up?
x2
There weren't many TUP applicants to CD's cabinet either, I think people wanted a rest. The election was for the president, not congress, and only congress can propose tax changes according to the game mechanics.
You should read up on butt hurt trying to prove public opinion is against a CP who beat your candidate and won an election with a clear mandate to...cut taxes...four days ago. I added pauses for dramatic effect and not because I have asthma.
I just call it how I see it Ser Hugh- I wanted some hard data to see what the country thinks and am thus far the only one to have provided any.
Sticking to the facts, high import/export taxes make that there's no legal trade, but blackmarket guys that "donate" from one country to sell in the other.
High income taxes sets the burden in the local producer, leaving aside those big guys with factories in Poland.
High VAT sets the burden again in the smaller producer (as any other indirect tax). Direct taxing, which don't exist in eRepublik is the one to raise to fairer society. Other road is lowering the subsidies.
..apart from the whole eUK electorate four days ago? Or dont they count when they vote against your candidate?
Have you tried submitting a ticket and asking the admins to reverse the election because your party refuse to accept it? Might work and there is no harm in trying.
Cutting war subsidies , especially very expensive call to arms , and getting a paid and "professional" military is much cheaper than random hand-outs, is the way to go to better budgets.
I'd cut Slovakia MPP, for example.
Lower taxes mean that foreign blackmarket-smugglers will buy in our market to resell abroad, since
our prices will be much lower.
I say yes to Tax decrease. 😉
Hence my recent vote based on policy 😛
You should have campaigned against it then , the people voted for Big Ant policy's less than 4 days ago the result was Big Ant 321 votes over 50% , that means his mandate was given the go ahead , your polls are worthless , the real poll has already been done with 321 voting YES.
Actually Ser Hugh I count BA as a friend and have no qualms with the election result- but I disagree with him on taxes. You know as well as I that CP elections are about a plethora of factors, and people have to vote for the whole package. That doesn't mean they buy into every policy, as this poll suggests
For example, this poll shows that most UKers totally agree with BA on war; maybe that was a much bigger factor for them.
Remember this is me, I always try to be objective
If people knew about policies, then they'd know it's a congress thing and not a CP thing.
"These questions are designed to make sure a good sample is taken, that all viewpoints and age groups are represented, to try and make sure our poll gives an accurate representation of the opinions of our citizens."
I do not really see how its accurate in any way when the entire population wasn't offered the chance to participate [via mass mail].
Interesting nonetheless, but its hardly credible to give any indication of a majority view/opinion.
Congress decides tax policies, not the CP.
Reported for vulgarity
To be perfectly honest, I don't think any of the election debate came down to the tax policies. The eUK as been in an 'us vs them' state for some months now.
Talon, you know that, from statistics mathematical point of view, your poll is sh*t. You have to prove your set of poll is representative and not biased. Sorry, learn a bit about the subject. Even getting a decent set of random numbers is a nightmare for mathematicians.
@Apron- it's called sampling. Have a read up, it's normally a very accurate way to assess opinion.
@Alpha- hence the control questions to check that it's representative- it is.
@Talon Karrde: You of all people would see the logic here, sampling is in no way "random", especially as you state😛 "A random selection of 10% of people from each party has been PM’d with a link to the poll...", there isn't such a thing as random, for your personal preferences give some biased actions to the selecting.
Congress decides tax policy, but they rarely initiate the change themselves.
Normally, changes occur as a result of a CP getting elected whose promised to change this or that. Or, if the economy is tanking and the need is so great someone finally pushes something through.
Mass PMing would probably have an even higher TUP/UKRP/ESO response and lower UKPP/UKIP/NE one, and would select for the most active. Unless Talon knew the tax policies of the individuals he asked before he asked them he couldn't have fixed it, and most people don't care enough to say.
"29 to 31 eUKers Doesn't Want Tax Decrease" as a title would of been more factual?
Also, Whilst polling is only half complete in UKIP the taxation trend is towards recognising that any CP with a popular mandate (over 50% in elections) can pretty much make the call on taxation they were elected upon.
So in this case it'd back BA's program of cutting.
Had CD won with over 50% or if the next TUPer wins and wants to jack the taxes up - then it'd acknowledge the democratic vote and support that.
trolling-the uk isn't really all that fun of a place at the moment, i mean we're supposed to be a team against other countries but instead we're tearing each other apart.
trolling-the uk isn't really all that fun of a place at the moment, i mean we're supposed to be a team against other countries but instead we're tearing each other apart.
x2
I didn't get a message. : (
trolling-the uk isn't really all that fun of a place at the moment, i mean we're supposed to be a team against other countries but instead we're tearing each other apart.
x3
Disappointing to see you taking this tact Talon. It's a shame you didn't think you're own government could've done with this kind of accountability but instead waited till your party were in opposition as opposed to taking the initiative.
I had a conversation with Beta last night where I discussed my fear this was an attempt to undermine the current government. Which he vehemently denied.
Let's just hope this doesn't sink into hounding BA out of office again...
Good informative article. Sadly some people take polling as an act against government. Must be a eUK culture to think like that.
Glad to see TWO is supported by big majority.
Well it's odd that in 2 months of Talon's leadership we had 2 opinion polls but within a week of BA taking office we already have another one and no doubt there will be plenty more.
Now couple that with Kravenn and Thomas' latest articles which end with a clear little snipe at the current government and it's not hard to draw the conclusion that this is in some way orchestrated in an attempt to undermine the Government.
Again, I support BA on almost everything, but disagree on taxes.
@Apron- actually I PM'd the bottom person on every list of ten in each party; there was no selection bias. I wanted a properly random poll to prevent the kind of accusations a few people seem to be making.
In short, I'm not making this stuff up, these are exactly the responses that the random people PM'd put in.
Well that's fine Talon. I don't disagree with Opinion Polls, infact I'm very much in favour of them, However they should be used to aid and inform rather than as a way to score cheap partisan points.
The same goes for Kravenn and Thomas, they're more than capable of applying to work in FA but instead choose to try and make some point by doing it unofficially and stating that as bluntly as possible.
It's a troubling trend, this semi 'shadow government' business. Our pool of workers for government jobs is already small enough.
If we head down this road of tit for tat non applications and undermining then we will never again have a unified nation. Instead we will sink further into division.
Well that's my two pence anyway.
trolling-the uk isn't really all that fun of a place at the moment, i mean we're supposed to be a team against other countries but instead we're tearing each other apart.
x4