Hacker News Reader

Comment by benpbenp | Hacker News Reader

I would be interested to hear more detail on this as well. Keeping in mind we are talking about taxation on the municipal level, doesn't it make sense that a tiny, not-so-special town will have difficulty getting away with higher taxes?

You say "it was nothing like what I knew from Norway." Does that mean in Norway you can have one crappy town charging 20% municipal taxes next to another crappy town charging only 10% municipal taxes, and this will have no effect on which town people want to live in?

I am not too familiar with the exact dynamics of the game, but I would think that as your SimCity becomes more awesome, higher taxes can be levied because people want to live there for other reasons. Is this not the case? I hope these social economists weren't just arguing, "taxes are high in Oslo, and there is no shortage of people who want to live there!"

View on HN

As far as I remember (SimCity 3000), you start out with taxes at like 7%, and you can get away with 9% when your city is small, but when you grow, you have to /lower/ taxes (down to 1-2%, eventually) to keep things stable. Which makes sense from a game design perspective (there are enough hard things when you're starting out, without having to deal with obscenely low taxes), but doesn't have much to do with real life.

I always thought that was funny, too. In real life, large cities can actually charge much higher taxes than smaller cities (think New York).

This just seems like a (lazy) way to make the game harder as you progress. Instead of bosses you have to do more with less. I don't think it necessarily reflects any sort of deep political/economic reasoning.

And an easy way to prevent massive revenue from unbalancing the game.

Remember that simcity is a socialist fantasy world: all development is directly purchased by central government. In the real world, zoning doesn't cost money, and stadiums are sometimes owner financed.

This is amusing, as not even any social democratic countries have systems where funding of development is so decentralized as it is in Sim City - usually a substantial amount of infrastructure development is done by central government, rather than the municipal government which you control in the game.

Even in the US, neither the state or federal government has so little impact at the municipal level.

The realistic way of handling this in Europe would be grants from national government. E.g. Norway sees massive grants go to smaller regions (and actually preferential income tax levels for the northernmost regions, to get more people to live there), as certain services are expected to be available even if the local tax base could not support it directly.

Subsidizing maintenance of regional settlement has been a key part of Norwegian government policies for many decades, and is a generally accepted principle by parties ranging from the various communist parties (none of which have been in government for a very long time) to the conservatives. The only exceptions you find to this is far right libertarians.

This is a similar situation to many other European countries.

It is seen as a key way to maintain the heritage of the country. We talk of "cultural landscape" - very little of Norway is actually untouched nature. Rather most other than parts of the mountain-regions, including forests, have been tended to for centuries, in various ways, whether logging, agriculture or herding animals.

Well there is some truth to that. There are economies of scale. Infrastructure becomes more expensive as you have to expand it, but it can also get cheaper per individual.

I should say that I haven't played Sim City versions since Sim City 3000 myself.

The main criticism was actually not the tax rate, as much as the model. In most of Europe, most tax money flows to the national governments, and large parts of the municipal spending then flows back out from the national government earmarked for specific areas, such as education.

In many cases municipal governments have no power to alter tax rates, or are bound to a very limited range.

In many countries most tax revenue also comes from VAT, rather than income taxes, and highly progressive taxation is a large part of the discussion of income taxes. Just the idea of having a single setting for tax rate itself in the original was/is something you would occasionally find advocated from far right parties, but never the European mainstream.

You would also tend to see larger infrastructure projects funded by regional or national governments, rather than coming out of municipal tax revenue.

Of course a lot of this would complicate game mechanics, and so it might be considered "just" a simplification, but it creates a model that from a European perspective is bizarre.

I haven't played the latest version of the game, but the easiest way to achieve a nice SC4 city with full of shiny buildings, cleantech and high approval ratings was to levy much higher percentage taxes on low incomes than high incomes (thereby driving all the poor out of your city). And without those pesky low income Sims your city would continue to do just fine. That's almost as much a of a far-right fantasy as solving suburban crime by placing police stations every six blocks.

Do you get high population that way? Because that solution is highly effective for low population special taxing districts like Chevy Chase Maryland

Reply on news.ycombinator.com