Chapter 540: The Financial Revenue and Expenditure of the Han Tribe (Please vote and subscribe)
Before there was a highway network and a railway network, or even a proper road, water transportation was the most convenient and efficient transportation route under natural conditions.
Just like what Bell said, rivers are highways in the jungle.
Luo Chong naturally has a deep understanding of this, so in addition to the affairs of the mission, among all the affairs of the Han Tribe, the one that concerns him most is the construction and development of the newly established counties, and the other is the sailing expedition team. Developing new routes as soon as possible is one of the most important things for the Han Tribe at present.
Five new sailing ships have been launched during this period. How much does it cost?
About 20,000 yuan per ship.
Well, with an average monthly salary of 30 yuan per person,
an eight-meter-long square-headed wooden boat only costs 1,000 yuan, and the sailing boat is so much different. Why? Because the cost is really unbearable.
Maybe some people don’t understand, isn’t it just a pile of wood? There are plenty of them on the mountain. You can cut as much as you want, and it doesn’t cost money. How high can the cost be?
Actually, it is not true. Trees on the mountain are free, and no one cares how many you cut down. But how much manpower is needed to transport such a big tree down from the mountain? How many cattle and horses?
Everything that people eat and horses chew is a cost. Why is wood so expensive? Isn't it because the transportation fee is expensive?
Moreover, shipbuilding requires long, whole, and thick giant trees, and they cannot be cut off for transportation, which increases the difficulty of transportation and the corresponding cost. It
is not enough to just transport them down, but also to store them?
Wet wood that has just been cut down cannot be used to make things. It must be dried in the shade for more than a year before it can be processed into wood for use. In other words, the trees cut down now are all prepared for the next one or two years.
During this period of drying, the wood cannot be exposed to rain, so there must be a special site. You don't need a house, but you can always have a shed to shelter from the rain, which also costs money.
Another thing is that when the size of the ship is larger, the number of accessories such as anchors and nails required will increase significantly, and these things together are not much lower than the cost of wood.
There are also tung oil, lacquer, hemp fiber, fish glue, and other seemingly insignificant things, but in fact, they consume a lot of money.
In addition, compared with a small boat, the most important thing about a sailboat is that it has more sails. A boat needs four sails, two for normal use and two for spare.
Spare sails cannot be saved. Without spare sails, if an accident occurs during the voyage, it is equivalent to losing power.
What are spare sails? For a sailboat, these are two spare engines!
Each sail is made of double-layer linen, which costs a lot of money.
Another thing is that the craftsmanship is expensive. An eight-meter-long hand-cranked boat can only be called a boat. Not only is it small in size, but it also has only one hull.
The materials used for the keel and the difficulty of the manufacturing process of a sailboat are completely different from those of a small boat. In addition, the high-temperature softening treatment of the wooden board requires a lot of fuel, and it also has two more decks than an ordinary boat, and there is even a protruding large cabin on the deck.
Not to mention the mast, which is the most difficult to make. Not only is the material selection demanding, but the manual work is also a test of the craftsman's skills. How to use the three tools of ink line, hand saw and wood shavings to grind a tree into a round column? If Luo Chong hadn't personally instructed them, those carpenters might not know how to do it.
In addition to these, there are other facilities equipped on the sailboat, such as two additional landing sampans, three single-person hydrographic reconnaissance boats, and lifeboats. The cost of these auxiliary equipment is more than 5,000 yuan, which also accounts for a large cost.
Maybe some people don't understand, this thing should also be included in the cost of the sailboat?
Of course.
Just like some people heard, wow, an aircraft carrier costs at least 50 billion, and it's not the largest. The aircraft carrier is so expensive, where is the money spent?
Counting it on the aircraft, a carrier-based aircraft costs at least 200 million, and an aircraft carrier has nearly 40 aircraft. The large aircraft carriers of the United States can be equipped with hundreds of aircraft, and the cost of the aircraft alone is 10 to 20 billion.
But can the aircraft be counted in the cost of the aircraft carrier? Isn't an aircraft carrier a ship?
This question is actually very easy to understand. If there is no aircraft carrier, can it still be called an aircraft carrier? Therefore, this community composed of aircraft and ships can be called an aircraft carrier.
Just like a sailing ship without a hydrographic reconnaissance boat, can it still be called a geographical exploration ship?
Even the sailing warships of the Age of Discovery included the cost of more than 100 iron cannons in the cost of the ship. The reason is very simple. Without those hundreds of tons of iron cannons, can you still call it a warship?
This expense is still very large for the current Han tribe. The main reason is that in fact, many of the current fiscal revenues of the Han tribe are not money, but physical objects, such as food, hemp fiber, raw lacquer and other things.
The main fiscal revenue of the Han tribe is borne by those workshops, that is, state-owned enterprises.
Mining salt, smelting iron, and weaving cloth are the biggest sources of income, because the people need to eat salt, so they can only buy it from the government. If they need farm tools, they can only buy them from the government. If they need clothes, they also need to buy cloth. At present, there are basically no private workshops in the Han tribe, and the overall manufacturing industry is basically monopolized by state-owned enterprises.
Of course, this refers to large items, such as making shoes or weaving baskets. For such things, the government will not set up a special workshop to compete with the people for profits.
The one level lower than these three major income items is the commercial tax, because this is collected in cash. There is also the current ship rental company in Hanyang City. The income from selling and renting ships is also included in the fiscal revenue. In addition, the head tax, that is, the mouth tax, is also a considerable income.
The last item is foreign trade, and the largest order of foreign trade at present is the carriage order from the Xin tribe. The Xin tribe needs a lot of two-wheeled carriages, and the quotation from the Han tribe is that such a car is not much cheaper than a boat. Although it is not paid in cash, it is definitely not less than 1,000 yuan when converted into cattle and horses.
And these cattle and horses can be sold to the people or rented to them for use by the Han tribe to earn income, which is also a considerable income.
In terms of expenditure, the Han tribe has spent a lot of money on construction in the past two years.
The biggest infrastructure is the newly established counties, city walls, streets, government offices, schools, and the transformation of water conservancy facilities in farmland. These public facilities are all collected during the slack season as much as possible, because corvée is like military service, which is compulsory labor and does not cost money, which can also save a lot of expenses for the Han tribe. Another
thing is the use of a large number of slaves, who only need to be fed and do not cost money, and there are plenty of grain taxes collected by the government.
In addition, the newly established counties need a lot of living supplies, and the people can spend some money to buy these things from the workshop. Generally speaking, the newly established counties can barely achieve a balance between fiscal revenue and expenditure, which is considered to be a good management by Luo Chong.
In addition to some food, there is basically no need for the old counties to give blood transfusions to the new city.
Even so, each sailboat costing about 20,000 yuan was a painful expense for Luo Chong, but he had to spend the money, which would affect future development. Besides, if waterway shipping could be developed, the income would only increase. In other words, this money would definitely not lose money in the future if invested, but it would be slow to make a profit.
But Luo Chong still felt that the income was not enough, because the Han tribe would soon have to add another huge financial expenditure, that is, education investment.
Education investment has always been an astronomical expenditure, especially in China, universal education, compulsory education, that is not a joke.
What is compulsory education? It means that you cannot charge tuition fees, let alone miscellaneous fees. Except for the pens, notebooks, extracurricular books and the like that students have to buy themselves, everything else is completely free, and you have to pay all the teachers' salaries yourself. What a huge expense.
So what is universal education? It means that the Han tribe needs to build a lot of schools to ensure the teaching environment, and it also needs a large number of front-line teachers, which all cost a lot of money.
The most important thing is that this is a complete investment, and there is no profit at all.
Will education investment be profitable? Of course there is, but it is not a huge return that can be measured in money, because it is a large number of talents and the improvement of the overall quality of the nation.
However, if you want to see the effect of this return, it will take at least five years to see the improvement of quality, and ten years to see the leap of talents.
Because schooling takes time.
Luo Chong's textbooks are four subjects, a total of six textbooks, Chinese has "Poetry" and "Han Li", mathematics has two elementary and intermediate "Arithmetic", popular science has "Nature", known as the encyclopedia of this era, and law has "Han Law".
How can we use the shortest time and the least investment to let the people learn these six textbooks and complete compulsory education at the lowest cost? This is a problem. If the time is too short, they will not be able to learn, and if the time is too long, it will cost too much money. So Luo Chong finally set the compulsory education time to four years. When
children reach the age of eight, regardless of gender, they must be forced to go to school. If they do not go to school, their parents will be convicted and not only fined, but also forced to do labor reform. They
go to school at the age of eight, and use the first two years to learn "Selected Poems" and "Elementary Arithmetic", complete the preliminary reading and writing of Chinese characters, and four mixed operations.
In the last two years, from the age of ten to twelve, students start to learn "Han Li" and "Intermediate Arithmetic", so that they can know etiquette and respect and hierarchy, and in this process, solidify the class division. In mathematics, they should also learn more advanced algebraic geometry and statistics, so that they can be used whether they are doing accounting or being a craftsman.
Finally, there are two books, "Nature" and "Han Law", one is a popular science book with a wide range of content, and the other is a very targeted legal book. These two books are not within the scope of the assessment. They
will definitely be taught. The teacher will take you to read, take you to read, and explain to you, but you will not be tested on this in the exam, because these two books are originally for popular science, one popularizes natural knowledge, and the other is simply popularizing law.
The purpose of doing this is, first of all, to let them fully learn and understand the contents of the book, which is obviously not realistic.
Just like what is mentioned in "Nature" that burning charcoal is poisonous, you must open the window for ventilation, and if you are poisoned, you must move the person to an open and ventilated place as soon as possible.
It's good to understand this, and there is no way to go into it. Can you still tell them what carbon monoxide poisoning is? So what is carbon monoxide? This involves another big subject.
Also, you can't stand under a tree to avoid the rain on a thunderstorm day, otherwise you may be struck to death. There is no need to go into it in depth. Otherwise, you will tell them that lightning is caused by the collision of positive and negative electrons in thunderclouds? Then what is an electron? How to prove the existence of an electron?
There is no high-power electron microscope for this special brew, and Luo Chong doesn't know how to prove it.
So the book "Nature" only roughly introduces some physical, chemical, biological, and geographical phenomena that may be encountered in life. Just know them and don't go into it in depth.
As for "Han Law", unless you want to take the civil service exam, you don't need to memorize it by force. Just understand what laws the Han tribe has, what you can do and what you can't do, and what kind of punishment you will receive if you break the law.
The purpose of teaching this is not to make students proficient in legal terms, but for the process of popularizing the law itself.
After all, the Han tribe does not have the ability to let everyone go to school, so how can all the people understand the law, know the law, and abide by the law? It is definitely not enough to rely on the government to do the popularization of law
alone, and the people may not buy it. Some people are born to think that the government is not a good thing and like to go against the government, especially in some large clans, where the original clan rules of their tribe are even better than the law. So in order to popularize the law for all the people, Luo Chong came up with this idea. When going to school, the teacher popularizes the law to the students, and after school, the students pass it on to their parents
and elders through their mouths, using the students' trumpet attributes to spread the content and importance of the law to all walks of life. In this way, it won't take long, at most two generations, that is, more than 20 years later, there will be no legal illiterates and illiterates in the Han tribe.
Compressing compulsory education into four years can effectively reduce teaching costs while ensuring the quality of teaching, and then when the 12-year-old students graduate, they should go back to farming and go on blind dates.
Those who are determined to move up a level will have to take higher-level exams, and then continue to go to school after passing the exams. Subjects such as "Han Law" are still waiting for you to memorize the entire book, and "Advanced Mathematics" are waiting for you. Whether you are an engineer engaged in infrastructure or a civil servant who understands the law, it is not a dream to work in the system in the future.
Of course, even so, the investment in education is huge. Although there is a considerable prospect of future returns, at least you have to persist until the day when you can get the return. Therefore, in order to obtain more fiscal revenue to fill the hole of fiscal expenditure, Luo Chong has come up with several targeted strategies.
That is the promotion and popularization of traditional handicrafts, as well as the rating and assessment of craftsmen. Based on these two decrees, we will dig deep into the potential value of craftsmen, train more craftsmen, and let them create benefits for the Han tribe.
(End of this chapter)
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