[HELP] How to represent a real country's tax revenue?

Democracy 3 modding
1

Hello!

There is no Finland in the base game but I want to replicate the republic of Finland in the game as accurately as possible in the fiscal year 2013 and release it later as a [New Country].

Could someone help me clear me mind on what to do here to keep the respective tax rate percentage on tax policies at place while having a sensible minimum and maximum income from a tax and resulting in an believably authentic value.

I don’t want to modify any of the game files as they are likely to be patched or something even though I tried to adjust the minincomes and maxincomes from tax policies in the policies.csv file. Ingame the tax incomes are of course quite messy in proportion to everything if done this way.

Concrete step by step instructions would be most useful to me and probably others in the whole modding community.

I have a feeling this requires some mathematics as well but I’m not looking for a math teacher.

2

As I understand it, the issue is that in real life, Finland had a 2% deficit in 2013, but in game it gives you something really, really off.

If I were you, I’d keep the internal proportions the same-that is, sales tax and income tax were essentially 1:1. Then, find whatever income Finland in the game gets, and set your expenses so that you have a 2% deficit. Then find the appropriate individual percentages from there.

3
  • There is no Finland in the base game.
  • The Sales Tax in Finland is 24% in 2013 and the Income Tax is 51% or so.
  • The Sales Tax and the Income Taxes bring in different amounts.

I’m not sure I understand any of your ideas. Not just me and Finland, Could you explain in concrete step-by-step instructions for everyone and every country?

Thank you for your patience.

4

Corporate tax! Okay.

You say you want the math behind it, which I did not see before. What exactly do you want the math behind? How to make the budget the same? How to calculate how each tax gets turned into money?

Anyway, tax calculation is just [subject amount]*[tax rate], where subject is what’s being taxed-income, inheritance, corporate gains, etc.

As to budget calculations…
Say we have a 25% sales tax, 25% corporate tax, 50% income tax, and 10% capital gains tax (I changed the CG tax from what you said to make the example math easier). I don’t know what other taxes there are, but they’ll all work the same way.
In order to adjust it to democracy, some sacrifices I think have to be made. The best solution is to maintain a) the ratio of taxes, and b) the budget deficit/surplus percentage. So our first step is to determine the government’s expenses. I’m going to set it at 10,526, for reasons you will see in a minute. Now, look at the country’s surplus or deficit. If it has a 5% deficit, as I will use, you will multiply 10,526 by .95 (if the country has a surplus, you multiply it by numbers greater than 1), which gives us 10,000 (this is why I chose a weird number before).

Now, divide all the tax rates by the lowest tax rate. Our CG tax is the lowest, so, respectively, we have 2.5 for ST and CT, 5 for IT, and 1 for CG. Now, all of our taxes are all of our income, so 10,000 = ST + CT + IT + CG.
But we also know that 5CG = 1IT; in other words, the income tax rate is 5 times higher than the capital gains tax rate. We can make relations like this for every pair of tax rates. Now, substitue into the equation above. To find what our in-game capital gains tax rate is, we will end up with:
10,000 = 2.5CG + 2.5CG + 5CG + CG
Note that it’s easiest to find the lowest tax rate first-the one you divided by before. Adding all those up gives us 10,000 = 11CG, or CG = 909. Now, just go ingame and find out what tax rate gives you that value! Or, if the game has the value of all capital gains in the country listed somewhere, you could use that to find the percentage. This would be done by X*N = 909, where X is the amount of capital gains there were given by the game, and N is the percentage you want to find.

The change relative to the previous year is [tax from original year] - [tax from subsequent year] all divided by [tax from subsequent year]

5

I have this and pretty much all the simple math figured out:
SUBJECT TAXED * TAX RATE = TAX REVENUE

But then applying it ingame is the hard part.

I need to make an excel table. But I still need a plan on how to apply these values to the game.

The mathematics part is about the bit resulting in this curve:

image

Based on that random curve picture I picked up on the Internet I think I need to refresh my mind on logarithms. Which are negative exponents right? Maybe I should just pick up a quick course on mathematics at my local evening high school? :smiley:

But I’m not looking for a math teacher here but something or anything to help anyone actually to scale ingame values to real life values.

I’m kind of new and confused on how to make a new country sorry.

[size=85]
CLEARED UP THE FIRST POST AND ADDED SOME BRIEF STATISTICS ABOUT TAX REVENUES FROM 2012-2013 FISCAL YEARS[/size]

6

Oh, a laffer curve…that’s harder. Understand that their validity is still disputed, and even if you accept them as true, no one is actually sure what shape they have-the one you show has peak revenue at 50%, for example, but there have been studies showing optimal revenue as being anywhere from 30% to 70%, and sometimes even further than that.