Tax efficiency - where does the "lost" money go?

[King]

King commented this once... saying the money was embezzled by middlemen.

No, some told me it should be. The money is simply not taxed. Your people avoid playing the taxes and simply keep their own money.

 

[King]

Is there a difference between taxing people at 100% with 50% efficiency and taxing them at 50% with 100% efficiency?

not to them, they still have the same money at the end of the day.

 

[King]

Does this imply that the tax based militancy comes from the effective tax rate rather than your sliders? So commerce inventions would increase this MIL if you dont adjust the sliders?
Not that I'm complaining, I think thats better.

Yeh, people don't care about what you say the tax is, only what they pay. If they can't get enough to eat they will get angry.

 

[Darkrenown]

King, you've got a problem here, because in this thread

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?p=11489946#post11489946

RickinVA reports that he could set his tax slider at 100% and it caused the POPs no pain whatsoever, because the low rate of effective tax collection meant that you weren't actually taking very much from them. That can't be what you intended, because then there's no trade-off between high taxes and POP militancy.

I think you either misunderstand what King meant or the tax system still. As King said:

people don't care about what you say the tax is, only what they pay. If they can't get enough to eat they will get angry.

Pops DO NOT CARE what the tax slider is set to, only if they can't afford their goods. Setting the slider to 100% is no problem if your effective tax is only 20% because 20% tax isn't too harsh at all.

They will care if they can't afford their goods, regardless of if tax is at 0% or 100%.

 

[Darkrenown]

Yeah there is - if you crank the admin slider to fight crime and increase admin efficiency, your pops will start to pay more as people become bureaucrats, and start getting pissed.

Think of the slider isn't necessarily "high taxes", it's "attempting to get high taxes".

Admin efficiency has nothing to do with tax.

 

[Darkrenown]

DR, you're telling me that taxes should have no impact whatsoever on whether POPs can get the stuff they need? I can't imagine a historical scenario where that sounds at all plausible. And in any case, it makes the game a complete cakewalk.

No, clearly high taxes can effect pops getting what they need. It's just it's the "not getting what they need" part that upsets them, not the "tax = x%" part.

Say you have a super-rich pop, you tax him at 75% but he's so rich he can still afford all his needs and some savings so he's ok with it. He can afford literally everything he wants in the world so more money is effectivly useless to him (yes, in real life you might be annoyed anyway, but in the game he has set expences he can afford).

On the other hand you have a poor pop. You only tax him 10% but he's so poor he can't afford all his life needs even so. He's upset because he's basically starving to death/wearing old rags etc. You explain to him you're only taking 10% if his income, that's pretty low, right? But that doesn't put any more food on his table.

 

[Darkrenown]

I think he is saying that even though your tax rate is 100%, the people are only paying 20%. If they can afford 20% and can still buy their goods then they will be happy.

Yes, as I explained elsewhere the slider is how much of the possible tax you're collecting. If you collect 100% of a 20% tax pops are only being taxed at 20%

I do think this is an odd design choice though. I think it would have been more fun to have to worry about the tax rate itself. I think the money lost due to inefficiency should go to expenses for collecting the tax. Then the POP would have paid the tax, but you just don't get it all for your income. The way it is seems a little hokey to me.

Part of the design is no money should be created or destroyed, so lost tax vanishing is right out.

Edit: side question. Since the tax effienciency varies per province (or state?) depending on where the bureaucrats are

It doesn't, please look at my post in reply to naggy above.

 

[Darkrenown]

I must wonder again, why would you care about increasing tax efficiency if you just have to raise the tax slider to get exactly the same effect?

If you never increase tax efficiency your maximum tax would be 20%. I suppose if you never want to need to tax more than that you don't need to bother, but good luck with that