After the Qianqing Palace, Liu Jun was playing chess with Zhu Cihong.

Empress Dowager Zhou and Empress Dowager Zhang and the two concubines Yuan Tian, the second king of Yongding and the two princesses also sat in the palace. Liu Jun's expedition was imminent, and the queen mother of the two palaces asked the emperor to invite Liu Jun, and the family had a meal together, talked about family life, and contacted the feelings.

Although Zhu Cihong was only thirteen years old, he sat there, but he faintly had the majesty of an emperor, and he was not like a teenager steadily. is the second king of Yongding, surrounded by Liu Jun, full of childlike appearance.

Emperor Zhang looked at the emperor and Liu Jun sitting there, and said to the Empress Dowager Zhou with a chuckle, "You see that the emperor and the king of the county are not flesh and blood, but they are as close as flesh and blood. ”

"Jiye is a good boy, His Majesty entrusted him with orphans, and he really did nothing wrong. With him, Daming has Optimus Pillar. Empress Dowager Zhou was moved to say, Chongzhen died suddenly, leaving the unprepared two of them, and she didn't know what to do at that time. Even the funeral expenses of the first emperor could not be made up, and the mountain mausoleum had not yet been built.

It was Liu Jun who transferred money, transported grain, completed the national funeral, began to build mountain tombs, and pacified the troubles in Beijing. Just like now, the Liao army rebelled and the Qing army attacked, but Liu Jun was there, but she didn't have the slightest worry.

Zhu Cihong looked at the chessboard and smiled helplessly, "It's just a little bit, almost a little bit to win the imperial brother." ”

"I was just lucky."

"No, I won't be the opponent of the royal brother again, the imperial brother deliberately let me, otherwise I will definitely lose very badly."

Liu Jun smiled, "I'm going all out, Your Majesty don't wronged me." ”

Zhu Cihong asked the two brothers to accompany the Queen Mother, and when they left, Zhu Cihong said to Liu Jun, "Brother Huang, what are the chances of winning this expedition?" ”

"Your Majesty, the minister dares to assure Your Majesty. Never let the Tartars cross the Great Wall defenses. ”

"Can't we fight back? Copy their back road, or send Liaodong's soldiers and horses to attack the enemy's den? Zhu Cihong asked with some excitement.

"Your Majesty, there are many ways to defeat the enemy, and it doesn't have to be head-on. Da Ming's current state, although he looks like a giant on the outside, but this giant is seriously ill, although he is on the outside, he is extremely weak on the inside. Now we have finally stabilized our illness and are about to rest and recover little by little. ”

After all, Zhu Cihong has a young heart. He understands the reason, but he feels that Da Ming is in a good situation now, and he wants to fight out of the pass and recover Liaodong.

"Your Majesty, give me three years, and after three years, I should personally ask Ying to go out on the expedition, lead the army to the east, and set foot on the Jianyu in one fell swoop. Straight to Heilongjiang, Weijia Beihai. ”

"Three years, but I don't want to wait for three days. The Tartars assassinated the first emperor and captured my Liaoxi. I am not reconciled. ”

"Your Majesty, if you don't fight an unprepared battle, if you are unprepared, it will be difficult to win. We want a win. And not a disaster. Liu Jun had to persuade patiently.

"What else do you need to prepare? We don't have hundreds of thousands of troops that have completed the reorganization, and the commanders of the troops are all old troops of county kings like Zhang Shan and Cai Yuan, all of whom have been in battle for a long time. He is often in command of soldiers and horses, and has rich experience. ”

Liu Jun wanted to laugh very much, the thirteen-year-old emperor, it was too difficult to make him understand what a real war was.

"Your Majesty, you must first settle inside when you go outside. Now the Central Plains has not been appeased, the bandits have not been peaceful, and since the Chongzhen Dynasty, there have been many years of turmoil, internal and external troubles, and now the situation is better, but it is only the surface. In fact, there are all kinds of wastes waiting to be rebuilt everywhere in the Ming Dynasty. There are still many people in the world who have no food and clothing, and what the imperial court needs is to restore local production, and what is needed is to implement new commercial taxes, enrich the national treasury, and make the people rich and then the country strong. ”

Zhu Cihong sat there sullenly, hanging his head and sighing.

After a while, he changed his mood a little.

"Brother Huang, I heard Wang Chengen say that the original imperial store in Jingshi is about to reopen, and it seems that it has been changed into a department store?"

"Yes, Your Majesty, these shopping malls have sufficient goods, and the implementation of the parity strategy can greatly reduce the inflated prices in Beijing today, and can make the people stable."

"Oh, that's right." Zhu Cihong nodded, "Brother Huang, I also heard that you implemented a new tax law in Jingshi and imposed a large business tax?" ”

"For the time being, it is only a trial in Beijing and Hubei, and the commercial tax is levied, but it is not a tyrannical levy."

Liu Jun carefully explained to Zhu Cihong the new commercial tax, changing the original commercial tax collection policy and establishing a new commercial tax system for the sake of the country's financial soundness.

At present, the newly introduced commercial tax is mainly three kinds of business tax, commodity tax and value-added tax, and the five kinds of salt, tea, tobacco, alcohol and horses are listed separately as special taxes.

"Your Majesty, just like this business tax, we have set a threshold for exemption from business tax for those with a monthly turnover of less than twenty silver dollars. For shops with a monthly turnover of more than 50 yuan and less than 300 yuan, a regular fixed tax system is adopted, and a fixed tax amount is given according to the size of their stores and normal turnover, which generally does not exceed 5% of the business customers. They pay a fixed amount of tax on a regular basis, and if their turnover exceeds the fixed amount, they have to take the initiative to make up the excess. ”

"For those large-scale commercial firms, we adopt the method of taxation according to turnover, and the merchants file their own tax returns, and the people from the tax office will check their account books and invoices to check whether there is any concealment and evasion."

"In addition to the commercial tax, there are also customs duties and mining taxes, as well as monopoly taxes such as salt and tea. In short, the new tax system will be more reasonable. We don't do things like killing chickens and taking eggs, but we also don't blindly ignore business taxes. ”

The tax system of the Ming Dynasty basically follows the tax system set by Zhu Yuanzhang at the beginning of the founding of the country. Zhu Yuanzhang was born in poverty, he was a monk who wanted to eat, and later participated in the rebel army to overthrow the Yuan Dynasty and became an emperor in the world, a legendary figure. But he really doesn't understand the economy.

Therefore, the tax system he instituted was full of many serious shortcomings. Taxes in the Ming Dynasty were too low, agricultural taxes were low, and commercial taxes were even lower.

Before Liu Jun crossed, he had an impression of the taxes of the Ming Dynasty that the taxes of the Ming Dynasty were heavy, the taxes were too heavy, and the heavy people could not survive, and the emperor often sent eunuchs to collect mining taxes, etc., and the people who were harmed could not survive.

But now, Liu Jun has a new understanding of the tax system of the Ming Dynasty.

Daming's taxes are not high, but low, too low.

But the people are really suffering, but the court actually hasn't received taxes, what's the problem? In terms of the tax system of the imperial court, the imperial court has a very low tax system on the one hand, and a fixed amount of taxation on the other hand, and the Ming officials' income is the lowest in all dynasties. The officials and literati also had privileges, and the local feudal clans were cunning and plundering, and as a result, the court was poor, and it was always poor, and the poor were going to die.

The people have been suffering, they have been suffering, and they are suffering to death.

On the one hand, there is almost no commercial tax, and on the other hand, it is a tariff that resets the card. There is a serious flaw in the tax system of the Ming Dynasty, that is, it does not follow the basic taxation law. Most of the country's tax revenue comes from the poorest people, and the richer they are, the less they pay taxes.

All kinds of levies and levies. There are also fire consumption, etc., and they have to bear all kinds of heavy labor, but in fact, most of the burdens borne by the people of the Ming Dynasty do not come directly from the imperial court, and most of the money they pay is not given to the imperial court.

The most amazing thing about the Ming tax system is the fixed tax system.

The so-called fixed tax system is similar to never paying more.

At the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, the annual grain tax of two taxes was almost 30 million stones, and then Zhu Yuanzhang issued an order. In the future, the grain tax will be levied as this standard, and no matter how much land is cleared in the future, it will no longer be taxed. Although there have been changes in the past 200 years, they have come and gone. This tax amount has not changed, and in the Hongwu period, more than 800 million acres of land were also 30 million stone grain taxes, and later when more than 400 million fields were registered, nearly 30 million stone grains were still collected every year. Even in the late Wanli period, the acres of land in the household department reached more than 1.1 billion mu, and the imperial court still levies about 30 million stone grains every year.

And even in reality. For more than 200 years, the largest period of grain tax collection in the Ming Dynasty was in the Yongle Dynasty, followed by the Hongwu Dynasty, and after that, it did not increase, but continued to decrease. Agricultural taxes are being reduced, and commercial taxes are being reduced even more.

When Liu Jun found out about this, he couldn't believe it.

I have the impression that the Ming Dynasty was more tax-heavy than the tiger, why was the tax too low?

The concept that he has been instilled in the past is how the rulers of the Ming Dynasty were brutal and debaucherous, how they expropriated and extorted, how they sucked the marrow, how the broad masses of the people lived in misery under heavy exploitation, and then how the revolutionary Li Zicheng was a hero raised the banner of rebellion, rose up to resist, and led the people to revolt and revolutionize and overthrow these exploiting classes.

That's how his textbooks were written at that time, and many articles were advertised like this.

According to the information that Liu Jun has now, the average yield per mu of the Ming Dynasty is not high, especially in the north is much lower than in the south, the average yield per mu in the north is about 1.3 stones, and the average yield per mu in the south is only about 2.6 stones, and now the official land and private land in the Ming Dynasty combined, reaching nearly 1.1 billion mu, even if calculated according to the output of one mu and one stone, the normal annual grain output at this time should also reach about 1.1 billion stones.

But how much is the agricultural tax in the Ming Dynasty?

Since Yongle, the annual grain income has been around 27 million stones, and the actual basic tax amount is 26 million stones.

According to this figure, the tax rate was only 3.16 percent in the early Ming Dynasty, and it was less than 2 percent on average in the late Ming Dynasty.

Therefore, in fact, whether it is in the early Ming Dynasty or the late Ming Dynasty, the agricultural tax rate is actually less than one-thirtieth, or even less than one-fiftieth.

From the beginning of the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Ming Dynasty, the population increased at least twice, and the cultivated land also increased by half, but the grain tax did not increase but decreased.

This is because the system of land quota set at the beginning will never be increased, in fact, it has already existed in the Ming Dynasty.

In the southern localities, tenant farmers usually pay nine buckets of rice per mu to the landlords, and the basic tax rate is about three liters per mu, and the part of the tax collected accounts for only one-thirtieth of the landlord's income, and the tenant farmer and the landlord share fifty-five cents, and the actual tax amount accounts for one-sixtieth of the total crop harvest.

Of course, this is only the basic tax, and there are other apportionments and burdens, such as the average amount of silver, the equal levy that replaces the labor levied, the conversion of silver for the materials offered, and the supply of post stations, the people's strength, and so on. But in reality, with all of this added up, the overall tax rate is still not very high.

Although the situation varies from place to place, in general, agricultural tax revenues do not exceed 10% of output, and in most places, this figure is much lower.

In fact, the basic grain tax is only 2 percent of the land output, and the remaining 78 percent is actually an additional levy.

But why is the burden on the peasants in Daming still so serious?

One of the important reasons is that the country's tax is too low, resulting in the Ming Dynasty is unable to take care of the local government at all, neither has the spare strength to build some water conservancy facilities, but also has no power to deal with floods, especially after natural disasters, and is even more unable to help the people.

Often in a disaster year, the people can only save themselves, and in the end they often have to borrow, and the borrowed money is often high-value. In the end, the profits rolled out, the wife and children were all rolled in, and the house and land were gone.

The second is that the salaries of officials are too low, and the officials and employees have less money, and they all rely on corruption from the hands of the local people.

After arriving in Wanli, the payment of taxes and the use of silver, which did not actually facilitate the people, but increased the burden of the people. Because of the lack of silver in the Ming Dynasty, silver has always been valuable. The peasants did not have much money to spare, and when it came time to pay taxes. You have to sell the grain for silver and pay taxes.

Therefore, when taxes are levied every year, the grain in the market plummets, and those black-hearted grain merchants will jointly suppress grain prices at this time, and the peasants can only sell more grain at a very low price in order to get the silver to pay taxes, and when the tax collection period has passed, the grain prices in the market will begin to rise again. The price of such food can sometimes fall by as much as 60 or 70 percent during the tax season.

Coupled with the privileges of the clan and many gentry, coupled with their various means of tax evasion, the tax revenue of the imperial court was greatly reduced. In many places, these burdens have even been passed on to the people, increasing their burdens.

This is actually equivalent to a vicious circle, the imperial court set a tax amount, after nearly three hundred years. The population and land have increased considerably, and state expenditures have increased exponentially, but the land tax has not increased, but has continued to decline. This made the imperial court's finances insufficient. The inability to manage the local area and to help the people in disaster years has led to the bankruptcy of many people. The number of yeoman farmers continued to decline, and the powerful local gentry continued to annex land, and these people, by virtue of their privileges and the collusion of the gentry, wantonly evaded taxes and evaded taxes, and even passed on many burdens to the common people.

Let the burden of the people be heavier, the people will go bankrupt, the powerful will annex more fields, and then there will be more tax evasion, less income from the imperial court, more and more powerless to manage the place, and even more unable to help the people in disaster years, and then more people will go bankrupt, and in this way, a vicious circle keeps turning.

In addition, the Xiaoice River, and the corruption of officials in the later period, the Weisho was abolished, the military tun was occupied, and the Weisuo army was useless. The imperial court had to recruit soldiers and horses.

It turned out that at the beginning of the country, the imperial court established a guard system, and the guards guarded the city, and the country did not spend a tael of silver, but it could raise a million soldiers. Later, it became the state spent hundreds of millions of acres of military cantonments, but it was useless, but it had to recruit hundreds of thousands of battalions, and every year from the tight finances to make up tens of millions of taels of military expenditure, which further aggravated the financial difficulties, and finally the three salaries were increased, and most of them were transferred to the people.

And commercial taxation was not taken seriously at all in the early Ming Dynasty.

In other words, at that time, there was a lot of waste to be built, and a very light tax system was set to help the economy recover.

In the entire Ming Dynasty, the commercial tax has always been in a state of existence in name only, except for a few customs duties, the rest of the real commercial tax, at most there are some specific product taxes.

In fact, when it came to the back, the emperor of the Ming Dynasty had already understood these problems, but they couldn't change them, and the resistance was too great.

The resistance came from two sides, one was the pressure exerted by the civilian clique on the emperor, and the other was local resistance and obstruction.

During the Chongzhen period, the civil official group never stopped complaining about the additional three salaries during the Chongzhen period, and they gave Emperor Chongzhen a disobedience and tried their best to attack the policy of increasing taxes, and they never stopped. In their portrayal, the increase in taxes is the cause of anger, heinous crime, and even the deterioration of the situation.

All the officials who proposed to Emperor Chongzhen to increase taxes were portrayed as villains by them, and Yang Sichang was even attacked and scolded for being incomplete, and was even scolded by Huang Daozhou as a "dog and a man". The emperor's increase in taxes was made possible by withstanding the tremendous pressure exerted by most of the members of the civil clique.

Local obstruction is also very strong, not only do they oppose the increase in taxes, but they even continue to owe taxes, and in many places they have actually never completed even the most basic regular taxes.

Just as Liu Jun opened a customs office in the southeast to collect customs duties and commercial taxes, the southeast was also extremely opposed.

Historically, there was no single reason for the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and there were many reasons added together.

But one of the most important of them is definitely to die financially bankrupt.

The biggest problem of the financial bankruptcy of the Ming Dynasty must be the tax quota and the commercial tax problem.

Last year, Jinhua County, which is famous for producing ham in Zhejiang, is Zhu Dadian's hometown, and the annual commercial tax is only seven taels of silver. In many places, there was no commercial tax last year, and they simply haven't collected commercial tax for a long time.

For another example, tea is a monopoly commodity like salt, and the tea tax is very heavy. The amount of tea taxed in Sichuan last year exceeded 5 million catties, not including the government's tea plantations, and the tea tax that could be collected was less than 20,000 taels.

What's even more ridiculous is that the tea tax in one province of Yunnan Province is only 17 taels.

Zhejiang Province is even more striking, the province's annual tea tax is only six taels.

And those tax officials, their behavior shocked Liu Jun even more.

A tax officer of the Shashi Tax Division, he was in charge of the Shashi Taxation Division, and he did a thing. After he had reached his tax quota in only three months, he issued a notice that for the remaining nine months of the year, the customs would be opened, and not a single tax would be levied on the merchants.

And a tax official in Hangzhou is more powerful than him, when he was in charge of local taxation, he directly set a new rule, let the businessman himself go to his tax yamen to file taxes, and then he did not check at all, he collected as much as the businessman reported. As a result, his move actually won the praise of many officials in Hangzhou and the DPRK.

The tax system of the Ming Dynasty was a problem from beginning to end. The problem of quotas is very big, and the problem of despising commercial taxes is also very big, but the most important thing is these people, the officials who collect taxes, and the merchants and ordinary people who pay taxes.

The tax rate is no longer the main problem, if the tax rate is only low, then there are still a lot of taxes. But in fact, not to mention the thirty tax one, the three thousand tax one may not be there.

For example, Jinhua County has seven taels of commercial goods a year, and Zhejiang Province has only six taels of tea tax a year.

There are tax customs officers who only collect taxes for three months a year, and there are more open ones who are ahead of the times, and they directly let the businessmen themselves watch and give, and they can give as much as they like.

Under such circumstances, those civil officials still shouted every day that they wanted to reduce taxes and not increase taxes.

Liu Jun didn't want to say anything more to these people for a long time, and now he wants to comprehensively reform the tax system.

Who dares to disagree with him, he will not be as polite as Chongzhen. (To be continued.) )

PS: Thanks for the little . Evil way, white clouds through the gap 01, wxwxxxxx, , tired will be heartbroken, you support.