[QUESTION] Taxation vs Freedom from Taxation

[Woryand]

Just a quick question --

When I dissolved my government (I'm blanking on the issue number, but it's the one with the pop-up to dissolve your government), my taxation went down to be in the top 99.8% (https://www.nationstates.net/nation=wor ... ensusid=49). However, my freedom of taxation barely went up, and is in fact not even in the top 1% (https://www.nationstates.net/nation=wor ... ensusid=50). What is the reason for this?

[Australian rePublic]

I think taxation is income tax, whilst freedom from taxation is all taxes. If not, though, then that's definitely strange

[Candlewhisper Archive]

The two stats aren't exactly opposed. Essentially though, the tax model is a bit squiffy in most circumstances, and super-squiffy for the extremes.

In Income Tax terms you've gone from 1.98% income tax to -34.82% income tax. So your citizens are only a smidgen freer from tax than before, but now there's some weird system where everyone gets given money proportional to their income.

[Woryand]

A second question, then:

My tax rate went down from 2% to well below 0%. Why didn't it stop at 0%, given that I am not giving out subsidies to people in my nation (and rather just abolishing the government)?

[Candlewhisper Archive]

A second question, then:

My tax rate went down from 2% to well below 0%. Why didn't it stop at 0%, given that I am not giving out subsidies to people in my nation (and rather just abolishing the government)?

That's not the only weird thing. You can also have government departments that have massive negative spends, which is treated as zero spending for many purposes in game, but which can still offset future spending increases. You can have vast negative industries that offset future industry growth. You can have hugely negative crime values that have increasing impact on other stats even after crime is described as non-existent. The vast majority of stats are not capped in either direction, though a handful are.

As to why the simulation is built that way, I don't know. I think in the past things have been said about it conceptually representing a resistance to re-establishing something, so your negative tax rate instead represents a resistance in your nation to re-establishing tax.

That's kind of explaining things in Watsonian terms, of course, when the real answer is Doylist. I suspect the Doylist real answer is that this game was never intended to have over a thousand issues or to have lasted this many years. It was just a nice bit of coding that was knocked together to promote a novel, and has grown organically into the thing it is today. As a result, it's not really a great simulation and shouldn't be held to the standards of simulationism, it's just a mechanism to tell stories and to deliver satire with, and should be treated as no more than that.