Currently, AI is very poor at collecting consumption taxes and I hope this can be improved.

[xuxin163]

As a mod author, I've already enabled the AI to collect large amounts of consumption taxes by modifying the defines file. However, the problem is that the AI doesn't evaluate which consumption taxes are more worthwhile to collect at all. I've noticed that most AIs don't collect the Service Consumption Tax, even though it's clearly the best tax category! The AI would rather collect 5K in Fruit Taxes than 12K in Service Taxes, and prefers collecting 0.1K in Art Goods Taxes over 20K in Liquor Taxes.

 

[Black_Shade]

It's not just tax whatever makes the most money, this is actually a bit trickier than you might think. You typically don't want to tax basic consumption goods for the lower class. This means grain, clothes, liquor, etc., as it lowers SoL, which decreases pop growth and increases radicalism. You want to go after upper class consumption items: art, luxury clothes, luxury furniture, etc. So the AI choosing not to tax liquor is usually a good move, not a bad one.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

AI tax strategy, like the player, shouldn’t be about extracting the maximum possible amount of revenue. They also need to consider their population’s needs and standard of living. That AI taxing liquor could theoretically have hurt their lower strata enough to cause radicalism problems. There’s also the issue of AI role-playing. For flavour and believability AI countries probably shouldn’t choose to heavily tax goods that their own ruling interest groups consume, even if they’d raise the most revenue. Lastly, there’s the authority cost. The AI also needs to think about how to spend their authority, and not all consumption taxes are equal.

I’m not necessarily saying the AI is good at doing any of these things, but a simple check of whether the AI is the collecting the highest earning consumption taxes tells you nothing about whether the AI is succeeding at performing as well as it should.

 

[xuxin163]

AI tax strategy, like the player, shouldn’t be about extracting the maximum possible amount of revenue. They also need to consider their population’s needs and standard of living. That AI taxing liquor could theoretically have hurt their lower strata enough to cause radicalism problems. There’s also the issue of AI role-playing. For flavour and believability AI countries probably shouldn’t choose to heavily tax goods that their own ruling interest groups consume, even if they’d raise the most revenue. Lastly, there’s the authority cost. The AI also needs to think about how to spend their authority, and not all consumption taxes are equal.

I’m not necessarily saying the AI is good at doing any of these things, but a simple check of whether the AI is the collecting the highest earning consumption taxes tells you nothing about whether the AI is succeeding at performing as well as it should

It's not just tax whatever makes the most money, this is actually a bit trickier than you might think. You typically don't want to tax basic consumption goods for the lower class. This means grain, clothes, liquor, etc., as it lowers SoL, which decreases pop growth and increases radicalism. You want to go after upper class consumption items: art, luxury clothes, luxury furniture, etc. So the AI choosing not to tax liquor is usually a good move, not a bad one.

But this does not explain why AI does not charge service tax，And sometimes they don't collect taxes on expensive clothing and furniture.