Bonuses to Save the Economy?

Day 1,889, 07:32 • Published in USA USA • by Syz2

Most people know what these bonuses are, but for those that don't, they are simply bonuses that increase our production every time we produce things, up to twice as much produced each time, which is known as full bonuses. Sounds pretty helpful; its easy to see why some are advocating for the eUSA to have full bonuses for that double production. The eUSA economy is pretty poor at the moment. But will having full bonuses save the economy? Let's take a look at exactly what full bonuses will do for us.

Let's go over a bit of background on our economic situation first, though you can feel free to scroll down to the TLDR if you don't really care.


Bad Economy from the Beginning

eRepublik has an interesting economy by Plato's design. It is designed so that people can become wealthy mass producers, and so it is designed for people to be able to produce much more than they need. By this design however, overproduction has occurred. Even for q7 tanks, the most demanded product and the hardest to start producing, sees much more product on the market than is actually being purchased.

Plato, tired of complaints, grants the blessing of the buying bot. This buying bot buys product from the markets, reducing overproduction and getting rid of all those extra tanks. But Plato took his gift back. Governments were introducing low-income, high VAT taxes, so that instead of citizens being taxed, the rich buying bot was taxed. This way treasuries could not be depleted, and citizens had low tax burdens.

This angered Plato. Plato saw that people had money, and they didn't have to spend real life money to get gold from him anymore, so he removed the buying bot. Products started to fill up the market. This is now our current situation. We are producing more than we are selling. This is a problem for other nations as well. Their wages are not far from ours, and they often try to export product.


The Effect of Bonuses

Now turning to our current situation and how to fix it, lets look at bonuses. Bonuses cause a production increase, so more product is produced and can be sold. However, we already have a lot of product on our market that isn't selling. Bonuses do not solve the overproduction problem.

Of course, its less strain on people when they can make their own products and don't have to spend so much. However, as people make more personal products and need to buy less, employers sell less and have less to pay workers. With bonuses wages will not increase. The personal production bonus can be good for some, but this helps those who have developed companies. New people without developed companies gain little advantage from bonuses.

New people are the ones who need help. They are the ones without money and product.

Bonuses can help the more wealthy, but not the new people. I'm not saying that I'm against having full bonuses, but we can't take advantage from them in an overproduction environment. We can't make more profit from extra products when the products we are already making aren't being sold.


Fighting Overproduction

What can we do to help with this overproduction? Not much, since Plato didn't give us much to work with. But there is one thing we can do which will be beneficial. Looking at the market offers I see that there is a significant amount of people from other nations selling product to us.

To help the eUSA economy we need higher import taxes. eUS producers aren't selling product in our markets. Part of the reason is people are buying product from outside of the nation. This is a problem because the money that is made from purchases does not go back to eUSA citizens. People spend money, but they don't get that money back in a wage. If we only bought from eUS producers, the producers that hire eUS citizens will be able to sell more product, and be able to pay more to workers.

We don't need to give money to foreign workers, when wages are so low here. Lets make room in our market for our own producers to sell, so sales go to paying the wages of our workers.


-TLDR-

Bonuses wont help our economy because we are already suffering from overproduction. To really help the economy we need to cut down on market surplus by preventing imports, which will also keep USD being paid to eUS citizens and raising wages.

Let's not go for bonuses because they sound helpful. Lets look at what the problem is and how to solve it. Ask your congressmen to vote for higher import taxes. Full bonuses can wait.