Seeing those two figures, especially the latter one, Wang Ye frowned.
It was not that he thought they were too much, but that they were far too little!
2.5 trillion Rubles. At the current exchange rate of 31 Rubles to one US dollar, that came to roughly 80 billion US dollars...
For a major country, annual fiscal expenditure of only 80 billion US dollars was, frankly, rather "pitiful"!
Especially compared with other major powers: America's annual fiscal revenue in 2003 was 1.78 trillion US dollars, while its fiscal expenditure had reached a staggering 2.16 trillion US dollars!
It had "run a deficit" of nearly 400 billion US dollars again...
The deficit alone was equivalent to five Russias. How could they possibly compare?
Well, America was the world's number-one power, in a league of its own. Russia could not compare itself to America.
So they had to look at countries roughly on the same "tier."
A major country in Asia had fiscal expenditure of 2.5 trillion yuan in 2003, or around 80 billion US dollars. That was still ten times Russia's!
You never knew until you compared them—then the difference was shocking.
Other major powers were all far more generous than Russia when it came to fiscal spending.
The significance of fiscal expenditure was enormous!
On the smaller scale, the expenditure budget determined the incomes of all employees in state institutions during the following year. That was a major issue affecting people's livelihoods.
On the larger scale, military investment, scientific research, public welfare, public security, education, healthcare, and every other area all depended on this figure.
The logic was simple. Take healthcare, for example. If you were unwilling to invest money in it, and doctors and nurses could not even support themselves on their salaries, who would still be willing to