Join the new world

I can see some articles popping asking for changes in taxes in South Korea. As an individual, I don't pay any taxes at all. As theocrat, it is in my interest that South Korea succeeds economically, believe it or not. Of course being a theocrat makes some people deaf for what I say, which ends up with my expectations never being too high with respect to the actual outcomes.

I will not tell you here what level of taxes you should have. I am the one who suggested the current tax levels (20-20-10 with 1 KRW minimum salary), and consequently the one who avoided the alternative (50-99-50 with a huge minimum salary). What you have now may not be the ideal, but I guess you all agree it is better than the alternative and they had a reason to be in relative terms. Besides that, e😜ost I don't see them as bad choices to let you start running the country.

If you want your economy to run reasonably well, you may at lease want to join a war game. It helps citizens to gain experience and the gold bonuses from leveling up faster, and this will let them spend more with items other than food. It will also increase the average wellness and make entrepreneurs happier. And, of course, the military benefits of having a population with higher military rankings.

First problem is: the standard entry cost for a war game is 200 gold a month plus the shared cost of each battle (a minimum of 50 gold divided by all participants). 200 gold a month because the cost of an MPP is 100 gold and the countries hosting the war games will not pay 100 gold for each country willing to join. Besides that, South Korea is not exactly a military power. Assuming a large war game with 25 members and 30 battles a month at minimum cost, the government has to raise 260 gold a month just for that.

Taxes revenue with current taxes

Currently there is in South Korea's treasury 15751 KRW and 18 gold. The last gold donation was made 16 days ago and, assuming it was everything there was in the treasury, it gives an average of 1.125 gold revenue a day. The only possible sources for those are gold collections fro companies and donations to the treasury, as South Korea did not conquer any region in this period.

The last KRW donation was 23 days ago. It is not possible to leave in the treasure less than 2500 KRW when donating to guarantee there will be enough money to pay the citizen fee for the next 500 new players. During the last 23 days South Korea received 149 brand new citizens receiving 5 KRW each and bought a Q1 hospital for 9000 KRW, so the revenue for those 23 days assuming there were only 2500 KRW in the treasury after the donation is 22996 KRW, or 999.8 KRW a day on average. May I remind you that during this period the theocrats were closing 16 companies.

The monetary market is selling 1 KRW for 0.015 gold and buying 1 KRW for around 0.0125 gold (1 gold = 80 KRW). With the revenue I exposed here using the best possible exchange rate it is an average of 10.25 gold a day, adding up 483.7 gold a month. Using the exchange rate of 0.0125, the revenue drops to 408 gold a month, which is enough for the cost of the (almost) hypothetical war game I mentioned and an extra MPP.

Of course you will have more tax income to the government with war games going on and an active weapons industry, but I cannot stress enough the role of the theocratic companies that are now closed in this revenue. Whether you like it or not, in the end this tax schedule is giving you, until now, exactly the revenue you need to join a war game.

Taxes don't fix bad management

Most people in this game don't run the numbers before opening a company and end up loosing money due to bad management. First business idea in a country like this is... Q1 food. The problem is: someone like me produce 48 Q1 food in one shift. A company with 10 employees like me can feed all the population of South Korea and have a good amount left to export. It takes only one good manager to drive out all Q1 food companies currently in the market.

Having the import taxes equal to the income taxes guarantees that even a country with 0 taxes will not have any advantages by entering the market, as they pay this extra on their revenue (with no way to evade) what the national ones pay on their profit and the employees in their salaries. If a manager can't compete with foreign companies in this environment then at least one of the four alternatives holds: (i) if it is a manufacturing company, he is not buying the cheapest raw material; (ii) he is not instructing or reaching an agreement with his employees to keep their wellness high; (iii) he does not have the ideal number of employees; and (iv) he is paying too high salaries.

Alternatives (i), (ii) and (iii) are complete responsibility of the manager. Alternative (iv) gives margin to a private agreement with the employees by setting a salary different from the job market offers; but if he is following the job market, he is buying the cheapest possible raw material, he has the ideal number of employees and they have reasonably high wellness (maybe with a travel-to-fight or gifting agreement), then the company is not profitable and should really close. Actually, no other company would be profitable, which means that either the market is flooded with the product or the job market is flooded with offers from bad managers.

South Korean food is now on average one of the most expensive in the world. The current taxes guarantee that no foreign company is paying less taxes than a (profitable) South Korean one. If you think you need extra protection, be my guest. Just know you would be protecting inefficiency.