In the past six years, due to the young age of the emperor, and although the two palaces are not opposed, they have also formed a check on each other, so it is actually Gao Gong who is governing the government, and his achievements in all aspects are the main reason why he was able to pursue "Wenzheng".

At the time of Mu Zong's death, the court's revenues and expenditures were on par, and six years later, the court had been able to make a surplus—but this is not to say that Gao Gong simply controlled the losses.

In the sixth year of Longqing, the annual income of the imperial court was 3.3 million taels of silver, and the expenditure was similar; But in the fifth year of Wanli, the annual income of the imperial court had reached 5.1 million taels, but the expenditure had also increased to 4.6 million taels.

Why is that? The increase in revenue comes from several sources.

First of all, Qingzhang Tianmu, which was also done by Zhang Juzheng in history, and Gao Gong also did the same, but at this point, their strength is actually about the same, and the effect achieved is not much different from Gao Shishi's view, which can be skipped for the time being, in short, it is a slight increase in the income of the imperial court.

The second is to continue to open the port. This matter is something that Zhang Juzheng resists, but Gao Gong is happy to do. The so-called practical learning of the Gao family, if you don't talk about those big truths, it can be summed up in one sentence: see practical results. Therefore, the idea of high-arch financial management is also in line with this: making money is great.

In the past six years, in addition to the Yuegang that has been opened during the Longqing period, the imperial court has successively opened four major ports, from south to north are Guangzhou, Quanzhou, Ningbo, and Tianjin.

Of course, the opening of the port at this time was different from the understanding of many people in later generations, not to allow foreign merchant ships to dock at will in these ports, but to allow the Ming Dynasty merchant ships in these ports to go to sea, but even so, the tariffs obtained by the Ming court from these ports were also greatly increased.

Gao pragmatic played a role here, because the imperial court had previously had a very bad system of taxation in commercial ports, Gao pragmatic made a simple and easy suggestion to Gao Gong: only the size of the cargo ship should be taxed.

The customs duties of the Ming Dynasty were ...... before Zhengde There is no tax, it is not taxed. During the Zhengde and Jiajing years, the point system began to be adopted.

The so-called point system means that 10 points of goods are transported, and a certain percentage is taken as a tax, and the specific value is relatively variable at the beginning, and then gradually set at 2 tenths.

In the Gaogong period, the situation changed and became a three-tax system: introduction tax, export tax, and water intake tax.

Among them, the introduction of tax means that the maritime merchant needs to pay a tax for the pass to enter and exit the seaport, and only the ship that handles the tax is a regular and legal merchant ship, and the tax is paid annually according to the size of the ship, but the tax is not high.

The terms import tax and export tax were "created" by Gao Shipra, and the names reported by the local government and the municipal shipping department were originally "water salary" and "land salary". Shui Shui is the import tax, which refers to the tax on the shipment from outside the port into the port; Land pay is an export tax, which refers to the levy on the transportation from the inside out of the port.

Originally, the local yamen and municipal bureaus listed very complicated taxation rules, such as "2 yuan and 5 cents per 100 catties of pepper and water", which sprinkled hundreds of commodities, some of which were easy to say if they were large, and some of which were inconvenient to calculate at all. Therefore, Gao Shishi suggested that Gao Gong should only be levied according to the size of the ship, but the destination of the sea should be divided.

For example, a merchant ship traveling to and from the Western Ocean (in fact, the South Sea) will be levied ten taels of silver if it is more than one zhang and six feet wide; For every extra foot, add one tael. However, because the ships to and from the East Ocean and Luzon are relatively small, the overall tax amount will be reduced by 30%. This tax rate is nearly half higher than the historical tax rate, but in fact, Gao Shishi is very clear that this tax rate is not high at all, and it is too little in history......

After the opening of the four major ports one after another, although it was only a few years, by the fifth year of Wanli, it could already provide nearly one million taels of additional tariffs to the imperial court every year, and an average of more than 200,000 taels per port.

You must know that at this time, Daming Haimao has just begun to "pick up", and it is only a starter in the view of high pragmatism!

The opening of the port has become the single item with the largest income of Gaogong financial management.

On the other hand, it attaches importance to the development of industry and commerce.

As early as the end of the sixth year of Longqing, Gao Pragmatic secretly instructed the military department, the household department, the Ministry of Industry, and some civil and military officials in some important towns on the nine borders to go up and down one after another, creating a momentum for the military industry and private industry. In the first year of Wanli, the imperial court officially adopted a new system of private and parallel procurement of the military industry.

Under this system, the imperial court continued to maintain the state-run manufacturing sector, but allowed some qualified "private enterprises" to participate in military manufacturing, and also reformed the ordnance distribution and procurement system. Under the covert manipulation of high pragmatism, the "contractor bidding system" was finally formed.

What's going on with this system? For example, if the defenders of Xuanfu need to replace 20,000 guns at the moment, the Ministry of War and the Cabinet will also approve it.

Then, first of all, the Ministry of War will issue a list and inform the various government and camp departments, such as the Ordnance Bureau, the War Bureau, and private military enterprises, that they will hold a bidding bid in the future. Then put forward the requirements set by the Xuanfu garrison and the Ministry of War after consultation, such as shooting distance, shooting accuracy, fire intensity, barrel cooling time and other technical indicators, and then start bidding.

The bidding meeting was presided over by the Ministry of War, and the section and the province sent personnel to participate in the supervision at the same time. The meeting is not only a meeting, but also must be displayed on the spot, and then the results are compared, and finally comprehensively considered, reported to the cabinet, and finally published in the public announcement, so as to determine the bidding department or enterprise.

In order to ensure the advantages of the government-run departments or to ensure that the government-run departments can be maintained, if a private military enterprise wins the bid, it must also pay one-tenth of the total amount of the winning bid as a deposit, and after winning the bid and completing the transaction, the deposit will be directly converted into taxes and will not be returned.

If the transaction cannot be completed due to the reasons of the winning bidder itself, the deposit will be fully deducted and liquidated damages will be paid according to the contract. The "reasons of the bid-winning enterprise itself" here include but are not limited to the difficulty of the enterprise to complete, the product quality is not up to standard, and so on.

As for the so-called "qualified" private enterprises in the military industry, the requirements for the conditions they need to meet are not low.

First of all, it is necessary to pay a "business deposit" of 100,000 taels of silver to the yamen of the Ministry of War to determine that it has the strength to carry out military manufacturing; Second, any military attaché in service or his immediate family members shall not be the proprietor of a military industrial enterprise; Thirdly, those whose immediate family members are involved in the crime of treason within three generations are not allowed to be the owners of the enterprise or participate in shares; Again, there must be a staff member dispatched by the Ministry of Military Affairs to supervise the flow of products in private military enterprises, and the Metropolitan Procuratorate and the six sections can send personnel to inspect them at any time (in order not to affect the normal operation of the enterprises, it is limited to no more than two times a year......

Anyway, there are more than a dozen restrictions.

However, what is slightly embarrassing is that after the military private system came out, until now, only Gao Shishi has opened two private military enterprises in the country: Jinghua Musket Factory and Jinghua Artillery Factory.

It's not that the people who can meet the conditions are only the only one who is pragmatic in the whole Ming Dynasty, but that others are still cautious about this.

But even if it is just these two enterprises, only in the five years of Wanli, Gao Pragmatic paid 70,000 taels of silver in taxes!

And the second town of Jiliao, which was the first to get the redress, in the first month of the sixth year of Wanli, under the decisive attack of Li Chengliang, the general soldier of Liaodong, played a "great victory in splitting the mountain"!

In the same month, the leader of the left-wing Mongolian Taining Department (Khalkha Bahrain Department) quickly invaded Hai and camped in the Split Mountain. Li Chengliang, the commander-in-chief of the Liaodong Army, supervised the troops out of the fortress for 200 miles overnight, smashed the mountain camp, and quickly killed and wounded more than 10,000 people, and Li Chengliang's troops beheaded 1,130 people, and seized tens of thousands of their equipment and livestock.