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I'm not a fan of import taxes, as you may know. It would be interesting to see how many foreigners continue selling here at 2%. From a math perspective it might as well be 99% but who knows how many irrational businessmen are out there with Canadian market licences.

c) and d) I could take or leave. More money, less money - it's not like we can spend more than what we have... unless we take out loans. So, ok, yes balanced budgets would be nice.

I am curious about why you think we need a minimum wage hike. If jobs are worth $40, people will put up offers for that much. But that would make working for friends or MU unaffordable. I just don't see the point.

But since you're such a young player, at 5 years old, maybe it's time for fresh blood. 😛

There isn't money circulating if everyone pays in tanks. The theory of economic growth is to create liquidity. The more the capital generated, the more cash we will see. If no-one makes money, no-one buys tanks. If no one buys tanks or weapons, no money is generated. So, it's an economic principle as to why communism sometimes fails. It restricts flow of capital. This game doesn't have a true economic system so we may end up getting ahead. An idea would be to enable more and more players to buy tanks with the gov't sending money to MU's to buy tanks or run co's for their fighters during wars. So, balanced budgets are only a partial goal. The real goal is to work towards consecutive surpluses and save money for wars. I think saving around 3-4 k per day is a good number (90,000-120,000 per month). We could get more aggressive in saving for more aggressive campaigns.

I don't think that there's much point in trying to apply real life economic theories, like monetary liquidity, to the limited eRep economic module. Governments don't print money. There aren't banks that loan out money at interest rates while also multiplying the supply of nominal cash. There's a 0% unemployment rate, etc.

I don't understand why you want to force poor new players to take a wage of at least 40 dollars. They prefer to have 10 dollars in cash and 100 dollars in tanks. They will lose that with your minimum wage thing and they will have to pay a lot more WorkTax as well.

You get $100 in tanks per day?
$7.62 a tank is the current market price.
That's more than 13 tanks per day.
Plus, I want to encourage players to buy and save...., Make capital fluid. As money becomes more fluid, more people will be buying, so it may cause some inflation, but we may have to bring that down by getting our tanks prices down. There are multiple ways of doing this (and one of them can be done with high VAT and high import [just not easily]).

There's little room for inflation when anyone can simply move to another country to buy whatever they need for less.

Also 13 tanks isn't unreasonable in a slave pit arrangement where the workers work overtime everyday.

I pay my workers $50+ per day per work...., so if they work OT, they can earn $100.

I dont want to burst your bubble but half of Canada will be gone if we raise minimum wage to anything above 20.... people formulate agreements, I work for $10 a day and I still clear $100 a day at some points, but I also pay $10 for a friend to work and we can both produce tanks at a qr of the price. I personally try to produce 100++ tanks a day! I have an engine that can show me where I can purchase WRM around the world for 0.02 and it is well worth it! I do also buy,sell and exchange tanks on the side! let me know if you would be interested in any of this business!

Before my friend went on vacation I was worked for him for something like 3 years. We started out when his Q5 was the top of the range. Eventually he got that up to a Q7 and I added one myself and he started working for me.

It's a great set up. Essentially it was like we were able to WAM for ourselves a second time each day only all we had to pay was the Work Tax on the $1 minimum wage.

So no more war? MPP fights will be OK if you will allow for a couple 10k expenditures. Before you fuss, I would actually like to see you implement your plan. That would once and for all settle the argument.

I like wars, but it's not like we've had a lot anyways. Just saying.

If you want more money in circulation you would support higher work taxes. The rest of that junk doesn't mean much. Taxes stimulate the erep economy. Don't question it.

Don't question it. Don't think about it. Don't apply critical reasoning skills. Don't pay attention to the evidence of a community dying faster than grandma on the electric chair. Be Canadian. Be a moron.

Now you're starting to get it.

eCanada isn't dying. The core group of players remains just as active as before. There's just a lot less noise, diversity, and colour around its edges.

It's what's inside that counts. (not that silly stuff around the periphery)

o7

lol, I just scanned through all the Congress candidates for this month. Natster is the only one with a real presentation.

He's doing it all wrong. Don't tell us what you stand for or what plans you might implement. Simply surprise us with how you vote and possibly post something in the forum in some other article's comment section indicating why you voted that way (or don't, because that part is quite optional, too).

I used to write presentations. Others didn't. They still got elected. I stopped writing presentations.

That said, there were a lot more options for us in Congress at the time. Now we can tinker a little with the Work Tax, Import Tax, and VAT. We don't really have much of a say in budgets and wars anymore. And nobody cares about the forum laws anymore - I doubt we'll get a quorum to change any of them anyways.

Good point about having less to plan for. 3 types of taxes is a limited range of options for discussion.

Okay, so we just had a controversial tax change that did create lot of feedback from players. I was actually quite curious about how the next Congress would respond to this feedback. So far only Natster has come forward to explain how he would be pursuing the tax debate.

My hunch is that the tax rates will remain the same. I figured if future Congressmen were interested in adjusting the Work Tax, they would have expressed those intentions before the election.

Or maybe parties are keeping their opinions hush-hush until there's a better time to get the debate rolling. Or maybe the topic is done and settled. Or maybe the discussion is actually taking place somewhere else. Or maybe we're waiting for the next CP to dictate whether the WT will stay the same or increase to 20%. Or maybe the old guard should come out of their shells more often to actually tell people what they plan to do ahead of time. The possibilities are endless!

Indeed.

I don't know what my intentions are for Work Tax until we've (I guess that probably means me or Aries - as he keeps promising 😛) does the math. But I imagine we will have a debate (I don't know where) about what we think the optimal tax rate should be.

That process makes sense, too, especially if there's not much reward or more votes for doing all that work before being elected to Congress.

The job will get done one way or another. As long as there are a few active members leading the pack, those decisions will be fine.

I was just thinking of ways to support olivermellors' suggestion of a mission statement for eCanada. Perhaps Congress presentations should be crossed off the list of possible strategies that help flesh out the skeleton of how those things get done.

I thought my presentation made it very clear what I stand for.

How do you suppose we generate the revenue for balanced and more profitable businesses?

Nice ideas, however increasing the minimum wage to $40 is rediculous. Right now, because of the high Work Taxes the average salary wage is now almost $4 less than before the tax hike. And our revenues are down nearly $2k since the insecption of stupid high work tax. Meaning that there are more pit workers and more companies not being worked (and some even downsized and resold). The work tax should be between 5%-7% to encourage work clicking. The import tax needs to goto 4% which still allows foreign sellers to make money since they mostly have 1% work taxes. The VAT is a stupid tax (IMO) Minimum wage should be low due to a huge need for MU's to have pits to cover some of the costs of war.

A 4% import tax would raise prices for a foreigner past what they can earn selling in their own country or elsewhere so it would simply eliminate foreign sales altogether (it's a matter of opinion of whether that's a good thing).

I guess a higher VAT and a lower Work Tax would encourage self-sufficient WAMing while still getting money from producer businessmen - as long as they sell in Canada. That said, RM company producers don't pay VAT. Again, whether that's a good thing would be a matter of debate.

Work Tax is also a matter of opinion as to what is optimal but at least there we could run the numbers right across the board for all industries and companies to see which companies would be profitable at each level.

Higher VAT just makes it more expensive for eCanadians to sell things. Your right it is a balance we need to find. Because once we find the balance then we should be collecting as much money as the eGov can. But if we over tax the eCanadian they will start trading off the grid, like the Tax collected numbers are looking like. And remember what our CP said, "I don't buy anything here in eCanada because it's not cheap enough"

A balance is indeed tough to achieve given the game mechanics and our production bonuses. It may turn out that the correct balance for a health economy is lower than we actually need to fund MPPs and war.