Chapter 74: Chapter 74 – War Tax (Part 1)

If an army lacked soldiers, its only option was to conscript serfs. However, in order to conscript serfs to expand the army, money was necessary. After all, feeding tens of thousands of soldiers daily was no small expense, not to mention the massive amounts of ammunition spent on training the new recruits. Unfortunately, since its establishment, the Hungarian Republic, had remained on the verge of bankruptcy.

The inexperienced civil officials in Kossuth's government lacked the skill and prestige to manage the finances, so the taxes they managed to collect were few and far between. In fact, many local officials in remote regions of Croatia and Slovakia had directly refused to pay taxes, knowing that the government had no way to deal with them in the short term.

In fact, President Kossuth was directly responsible for Hungary's current predicament. It could be said that the newly-established Hungarian Republican had already surpassed the Austrian regime in terms of corruption. This was no different from how opportunists such as Talleyrand, Mirabeau and Danton had used the Legislative Assembly in the nascent stage of the French Revolution to fill their pockets.

In fact, the corruption in the government was neither surprising nor unexpected. Between the collapse of an old order and the establishment of a new order, civil officials employed unscrupulous methods upon being freed from oversight by the sovereign.

"Mr. Kossuth, your government has already collected war taxes twice this year!" protested Margrave Pulszky.

Taxation in Hungary had always been the bane of the common people. In the past, when the decadent aristocracy controlled the government, they often imposed arbitrary taxes which led to the common people often having to sleep with empty stomachs. Therefore, when the republic was established, the common people thought that they would finally be able to lead decent lives, but it was not meant to be.

Despite the end of the "Austrian exploitation," their lives were still hard. In fact, things had gotten worse. The government had been forced to give great autonomy to the major cities of Hungary in order to bring them into the fold of the Republic. As a result, these cities copied the federal structure of the United States of America across the Atlantic which not only allowed the central government to collect taxes, but also the local governments.

Simply put, the number of tax collection agencies had ballooned. The high-level civil officials took this opportunity to extort money by formulating new taxes, so naturally the grassroots civil officials followed in their lead. Of course, neither the aristocracy nor the major capitalists needed to pay any taxes which left only the common people to foot the bill. However, the war tax was an exception to this rule. Regardless of status, nobles and capitalists had to pay this tax.

The nobles, however, were unwilling to pay the war tax again. After all, the Hungarian Republic had only been around for less than three months. In less than three months, the government had already levied two war taxes, and was now planning to levy a third war tax. Before the war had even begun, it had already taken so much money from them.

In addition, the nobles couldn't find ways to evade taxes, unlike the capitalists. After all, their wealth predominantly came from their land. The land and farms owned by most nobles was common knowledge as was the average yield from those farms. It was not difficult to determine whether anyone was skimping on the taxes.

The taxes given by the nobles were mostly a percentage of the grain yield from the farms on their lands. Under normal circumstances, this system of percentage taxation rather than the taxation of a certain amount relieved the burden on the taxpayers. However, one exception was the war years.

During years of warfare, agriculture yield in most borderlands fell steeply or even came to a halt. This led to the price of grain skyrocketing due to the significantly reduced supply. As a result, nobles, who owned huge swathes of land but were usually in debt due to their lavish lifestyle, would be able to make a sizable profit by selling their grain. Kossuth, however, wanted them to give a huge chunk of their treasured grain over as taxes, so it wasn't surprising that they were averse to the repeated war taxes.

 

-TO BE CONTINUED-

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