Taxes and trade...

[StarNate]

Ok, so if i enact Free Trade, which tax/land system do I want? Since it gives me a hit on tariffs, and that's kind of my go to income...

[VoiD]

That depends on the kind of society you want, and what your long term is.

No tax is ever positive, all of them will hurt your nation, the money you're getting is being stolen from the population, the only thing you can do is chose which members of your population you're ok with hurting the most.

You can tariff imports while importing great volumes from trade partners, a good candidate would be grain from China, most nations can't produce anywhere as much as china does, so even at a hefty tax their grain is still going to be cheaper for your local markets than your own, so it should increase people's SoI accordingly.

An alternative with free trade would be to tax the consumption of grain instead, while importing a great ammount from a country like china, the end result might be "the same" but this might push the poor from your nation into misery, creating radicals and possibly a revolution, it's also a rather tyranical approach, so taxing grain usually costs a lot of authority, liberal nations can't afford to do it.

Meanwhile you could chose to tax the wealthy in your nation, but if you don't own many businesses creating many aristocrats and capitalists, then there's noone to tax, and you won't be making much money anyway, besides, if you piss them off and your laws give them a lot of political power, you might be seein an even worse revolution than you would if you were just taxing the poor.

Or, if you're late game, and your economy is running well, you have far too much income on your hands and you'd rather increase people's SoI instead you might reduce all taxes to a minimun, remove tariffs, increase spending and pass laws to make taxation even less effective instead.

So, again, it depends on a lot of factors.

[TheCollector]

Originally posted by StarNate:

which tax/land system do I want?

You can hover the mouse over the taxation laws and get a tooltip with detailed forecast of income changes. So usually you don't want Consumption-Based or Land-Based Taxation.

If you already have Per-Capita Taxation, you won't be able to change your tax system for a long time at all since the only IG to support a change to one of the later systems is the Trade Union.

It depends on your nation's society and economy and your goals which of the 3 better systems you want to use.

Per-Capita Taxation :
A tax system that disproportionally taxes the poor through a combination of income and per-capita taxes.

Proportional Taxation :
A mainly income-based tax system that tries to ensure everyone pays a roughly equal share of their income to the state.

Graduated Taxation :
A tax system that aims to put the burden of taxation primarily on the well-to-do through high Dividends taxes.

Per-Capita Tax is not that bad if you raise SoL and all your "poor" people are educated and have good jobs and income.