"So that's how it is!"
The wind blew across the lake, ripples dancing around the boat. Wen Xunpeng truly understood now.
He did not know that in the future there would be many channels for fiscal revenue, but he understood that right now, fiscal revenue boiled down to two major channels: grain and salt.
One could say that both the localities and the imperial court relied entirely upon these.
In contrast, official salaries and clerk stipends were growing thinner and thinner. This was not to say a thick salary was necessarily good, but whether official or clerk, their pay was often only a tenth of what was actually required.
Particularly for the clerks—the government needed to maintain a massive host of petty clerks, yamen runners, gatekeepers, corpse-examiners, and patrol guards, yet their wages were merely the Work-and-Food Allowance. The so-called Work-and-Food Allowance, as the name implied, was just the basic cost of meals, amounting to a mere 4.8 taels a year, and the emperor even wanted to abolish it entirely.
In other words, aside from officials of various ranks, all clerks and runners in non-leadership positions were to engage in unpaid forced labor from this day forward (an imperial decree issued by Kangxi upon his ascension to the throne and executed for two hundred years).
Fortunately, in this world, ministers had remonstrated and stopped it.
To survive and keep the finances running, the localities had no choice but to figure out ways to share the spoils.
Excess Collection, Coercive Conversion, Grain Transport Levy, Provincial Administration Fee.
Among these, the Provincial Administration Fee was the largest. According to the unwritten rules, handling a major case meant giving up a tenth as the Provincial Administration Fee, and currently, one of the largest cases handled involved the granaries.
The granaries bought, sold, and