I think you've way way way overblown the effect of this one project. You're preaching its virtues to an absurd level. Look at what it actually says:
I stand by what I said. We were given a list of four problems that need solving. We've addressed, if not entirely solved two, with a sizeable flow of Capital Goods (FMP promise) and an increase in investment capital. We haven't addressed them
comprehensively and beyond all question, but we've taken significant steps in those directions.
One of the problems is not ours to solve- the labor supply, which we can address only very indirectly.
The fourth and final problem is the liquidity shortage, which is addressed by the banking reforms. The banking reforms aren't a magical thing, but they are a
significant thing; they restructure the economy in a way that has the potential to be quite noticeable as far as what average citizens experience.
You say "there are multiple other steps we need to complete," but this is both the last of the first-stage steps available to us, and a major step in the right direction.
With that said, please stop accusing me of calling this a silver bullet. It's a big deal. It's impactful. It's gonna affect the civilian economy significantly. It doesn't "solve everything" or whatever... but it solves
enough to be worth 100 R, even when that means we'll probably leave some dice fallow next turn.
It doesn't fix the problem of capital good supply. Even our deal with the FMP isn't fixing the supply; that won't happen properly until we've got 200-300 Capital Goods in Reserve and can send our excess +10 to +20 CG supply to the civilian economy directly. And we've done nothing for the lack of talented labor; immigration isn't helping because it takes years for people to get educated and we're still working our previous, far smaller immigration wave through the education system. And both of these problems will be exacerbated by doing the Banking Reforms, not helped.
1) You point out the Capital Goods issue. Well, my plan also has Chicago, as the leading 'no banks' plan does not. +6 Capital Goods per turn means the happy day when the surplus Capital Goods get back to the civilian economy is going to come that much sooner. Furthermore, again, this is an issue we have at least begun to address... but the four problems are interlocking, so addressing one of them without trying to address the others has less impact.
2) You point out we haven't addressed the labor issue. The new immigrants aren't just incompetent lumps. A less top-down structured private sector has a lot more room for them to find jobs that they
can do despite the gaps in their education. The labor supply problem isn't self-solving, but if the investment capital and tools are available to start civilian sector enterprises, the demand for labor will incentivize people to find solutions that work at ground level. It's a problem that will tend to
start solving itself without our input.
3) Tying back to what I said in (1), saying "the banks will exacerbate these issues" oversimplifies. Again, go back to the text of the economic census report. The four problems are interlocking. That doesn't mean "trying to solve one automatically makes the others worse." It means "solving one is less than half as effective as solving two." The solutions synergize, so that pushing on one of the four alone does very little but pushing all four (or as many as possible of the four) achieves more. Pushing the "banks to address the liquidity shortage" issue thus helps more now than it would if we hadn't done anything regarding the other issues... but conversely, all the things we've already done are less impactful in the absence of the banks.
I expect it to be 4 turns from now. But I think you are significantly overestimating the amount of effect the non-governmental economy actually has. Especially on the scale of the Treasury.
I'm not proposing to do the banking reforms because I have a complicated profit-loss statement all worked out.
I'm proposing to do the banking reforms because I consider "get the civilian economy up, running, and thriving" to be one of those fundamental overarching objectives that falls under the broad heading of "do your job" for the government agency responsible for managing the economy.
It's like the recent focus on improving food quality. That's all narrative. There is no Number Go Down governing it; our numbers look fine. But we know how to read, and we know how to read between the lines, and it's clear that improving food quality is actually relevant and that this is something that the public wants. And Treasury operates within a democracy, so doing what people want matters.
The banking reforms are,
in effect, narrative, because we don't have the numbers for exactly how they impact the civilian economy. But "get the fiscal economy running properly" is very much within the boundaries of what a government agency responsible for the economy
should do and should treat as a priority. Right up there with stuff like founding centrally planned housing blocks and megafactories and whatnot, and arguably
more at the core of what Treasury should theoretically care about doing.
Fairly important, but not make or break for the civilian economy. Acting as a large institutional investor is a critical part to leveraging people from small to medium scale production into production scales that matter on the Treasury's level of operations. Because the thing is that the economy is growing. It is adding jobs, it is increasing production. At the same time, as Somerwell said in the second world war "All the small plants of the country could not turn out one day's requirements of ammunition."
Yeah, but then, I'm interested in quality of life. Treasury's great at starting giant megafactories to keep GDI supplied with bullets or any other specific single thing that we need a jillion of. Not so great at centrally planning the toothbrushes.
I think that making the civilian economy grow rapidly will have a disproportionate impact on quality of life and provide a lot of opportunities and increasing happiness for everyone, helping to defuse the tensions that we've been fearing might pop up surrounding the refugee waves. I think it's worth it.
Still, you are looking at a per turn increase of at least +5 in tax revenue every turn of next plan, because enough of the building blocks are in place. No single project is make or break for the civil economy. No single decision makes things go brrrr, it is a combination of factors where good enough is good enough.
That's fair. At the same time, I want to
really strengthen the civilian economy. And when you're talking about acceleration curves like that (+5 RpT per turn, R per turn
squared), increasing acceleration early on really helps.
As an example, suppose we could increase the economic growth rate from an average of +5 RpT per turn to +6 ("at least +5" implies the possibility of more if we play our cards right). At +5 RpT per turn, we pick up an extra 680 R of tax income. At +6 RpT per turn (admittedly, an approximation since we normally measure everything in five-point impacts), it's 816 R. That's a fair return on investment right there... and again, this is without even considering narrative effects on the civilian economy, just the tax receipts.
I still like the banking reforms, enough that I'd be willing to potentially offline dice for them.
But I think it would be a mistake to do them in Q4, instead of waiting until Q2 or Q3 when they will offline less dice, and when we'll have a better picture of our strategic position.
I think anyone who suggests
Banking Reforms in 2062Q2-Q3 will get a LOT of pushback, because everyone is going to have a long long list of 20 R/die projects they very much want to fund and that they've been waiting on for anywhere from one to three turns if not more.
If "but without banking reforms we won't be able to activate all our dice at 10 R/die" is going to win the argument
now, it seems likely that "but without banking reforms we won't be able to do a full set of Orbital dice plus that shipyard we need plus the factory we need plus the subways we need plus..." is going to win the argument
later.
Still, I like that the leading plan does do political promises. Switching the banking reforms to interdepartmental favors for PS to spin off more resources during reallocation would be nice, especially with confirmation that it is FIFO and that we will still have those options open in reallocation itself (allowing for double dipping).
We have a huge amount of +PS as it is. I'm not sure how much we
can burn off without deliberately doing things of questionable value.
I'm a little nervous about the "double dipping" guarantee wording. During past reapportionments we regularly "double dipped" in the sense of promising the same thing to two parties and getting credit from both of them for doing it because they both wanted the same thing. I'm sure we'll get to do that again, so if (for instance) the Market Socialists and the Developmentalists both want us to promise +1200 RpT of GDP growth, we can get support from both for promising it.
What I'm
not so sure about is whether we can promise the Developmentalists +1200 RpT
now and still get extra credit from the Socialists for promising it to them
later when they know we're already committed to doing it whether they vote for our Plan outline or not. And I'm not sure the QM's comment on that subject really clears that up? Clearly
simultaneous double dipping is allowed, but I'm not sure that means double dipping in separate quarters is allowed. The second party you negotiate with should already know what you've agreed to do, after all, and baked that into their decision-making.
First off, it's a liquidity issue as stated in the census report, not crisis as you are attempting to portray things in a worse position by subtly changing the language.
It's a 'crisis' insofar as the civilian economy actually matters. If we want to act as if it doesn't matter, then the liquidity doesn't matter either. Otherwise, it's the one entirely unaddressed bottleneck from the 2061Q1 economic census report that we
haven't touched.
So... I don't know
where you get the idea that I said "prevent an economic collapse." My point is that this is the issue that's bottlenecking civilian economic growth- there's a liquidity crisis. That doesn't stop the state from feeding people, it doesn't stop the war factories and tiberium refineries from chugging along... But it does impact the civilian-sector private economy.
The latter of which is not enough of a priority that would have knock-on effects of limiting us so early in reallocation. Knock-on effect preventing us from increasing our income and activating dice to achieve plan goals.
In this case, the knock-on effect actually doesn't do anything to stop us from increasing our income. Check the plan drafts. We can afford full-spread income-increasing meme plans that build up RpT at just about the maximum efficient rate possible either way. The only question is how much
else we pay for in that first turn or two. And there... Well, we roll a few less dice right up front, I agree, but in exchange we get to start the civilian economy's full-bore expansion a year or so sooner. I consider it a reasonable tradeoff given the clear narrative foreshadowing that "restart civilian economy" is something people consider to be our job and actually sincerely want to happen.
The third thing is that according to the census report, liquidity is only one of four issues to bolstering the civilian economy and is not clear that it is the biggest contributor to restarting the economy. If we were to hamstring treasury we may be prevented from solving those other issues in the future.
How? We're talking 100 R. Not 100 RpT, 100 R. That's on the scale of "some subways get finished a couple of turns later, we have one less shipyard, the Talons' funding shows up three months later, and/or
Reykjavik Phase 5 completes in 2063Q3 instead of 'Q2." Something like that.
The critical stuff still gets covered. It's the stuff that, in the final analysis, we
can choose not to do that runs into the most trouble.
From my reading, issues two and three relate to how the majority of the civilian economy does not produce as much goods as the state does and how there is insufficient capital goods in civilian hands that would allow them to produce more goods for a thriving economy. Issue two means civilian money flows back into GDI hands due to insufficient civilian manufacturing compared to GDI manufacturing. Issue three is insufficient capital goods in civilian hands leading to insufficient civilian manufacturing.
It appears to me the better method of bolstering the civilian economy is not banking but rather a massive infusion of capital goods that would solve two issues at once. Banking may improve one of the four issues, but CG production may solve two instead and the opportunity cost of banking may be sub-optimal.
We're not going to get significantly more Capital Goods production out of a Chicagoless plan like Lightwhispers' than we will out of mine. The opportunity cost of the banking reforms will not meaningfully delay Capital Goods production. And supplying the capital goods to churn out products for the civilian sector does a lot less good if credit isn't available to finance the use of those goods in a flexible manner.
Real-life industrialized societies tend to have functional banking systems for more than just handling debit cards or whatever. there's a reason for that.
...
I'm probably going to go to bed fairly soon, and I may not address any more of this stuff. Suffice to say that I think the banking reforms are actually a significant project, and
Chicago Phase 4 is a desirable project, and I think that both those projects justify the Resource cost we have to commit to them. Yes, it means we don't have a
really big ~300 R pile of extra money to pick at in 2062Q1, only a smaller ~130 R pile. I think it's worth it. I especially think the banking reforms are worth it, narratively and in practice.
