In Jinling City, Li Xuan looked at Lu Yuzhi's report again. The focus of this report was not to report on the war in the Western Regions. In fact, there was nothing to say about the war in the Western Regions today.
The army of the Tang Dynasty suppressed the enemy with force, and nearly 200,000 troops rushed forward. They fought steadily and did not advance rashly, and forced the Tatars out of the Western Regions step by step.
There is no conspiracy or tactics at all, it relies on super strong national power.
This left Ulihan and other Tatar generals with nothing but strategies to use.
Therefore, the wars in the Western Regions in the past year or so have tended to be uneventful from the details, and there have not even been a few major battles.
The focus of Lu Yuzhi's report this time was still on the war in Central Asia.
Now that the Tang Dynasty has reached Turpan City, the next step will be to enter the Ili area, and then to the Kazakh plains. By that time, the existing number of cavalry will not be enough.
For this reason, Lu Yuzhi once again asked for reinforcements, not anything else but cavalry.
After Li Xuan calculated the cavalry strength of the army, he gave the instruction: transfer to the Privy Council!
The general meaning of this instruction is that I already know it, and you, the army, can take care of it yourself, but don't expect to take advantage of it to ask for more military spending.
The Western Expedition seemed important, but it was far from requiring the empire to allocate a large amount of war expenses. At most, it would only provide a small subsidy, and the army still had to deal with the war expenses itself.
This is not because Li Xuan is unwilling to give money, but because the empire has been spending money like water in the past two years.
Obviously the empire's fiscal revenue is increasing year by year, but the money spent is also increasing year by year!
I have never heard of infrastructure construction in various parts of the empire. A large amount of money is spent every year, and then river defense, transportation, industrial support, etc., as well as education, etc., each aspect costs a lot of money, especially
It is education funding. Since the 25th year of Xuanping, the empire has begun to significantly increase basic education funding.
Its proportion of fiscal expenditure has increased year by year, from 1% in the past to 3%, then 5%, and now it has reached 6%.
Twenty-nine years of education funding accounted for 6.5% of fiscal expenditures.
This is a quite scary figure, because Datang's annual fiscal expenditure budget is more than 200 million yuan, and 6.5% is more than 10 million yuan.
Most of these education funds are used to subsidize the establishment of more government-run schools in various places, especially government-run primary schools.
Last year, the Ministry of Rites issued a slogan to increase the enrollment rate of school-age children to over 80% in the next ten years.
Although this school-age children are only limited to boys, and even if the enrollment rate is limited to six-year primary school, it is very difficult to achieve an enrollment rate of more than 80%, because quite a few families do not even have one child.
It is difficult to afford children’s education. At the same time, most contemporary families have more than one child, and many are families with several brothers. It is very difficult for all families to send most of their school-age boys to school.
This requires the government to further reduce primary school tuition fees and provide scholarship subsidies to more outstanding students. To be honest, this part of the cost is very huge and puts a very heavy burden on local finances and the central finances.
To a certain extent, this was the fault of the Tang Empire, because in its early days, the Tang Empire adopted an elite education system and deliberately set too high the status and treatment of school teachers, resulting in very high costs for running schools.
An ordinary junior primary school teacher's annual income can reach more than one hundred yuan, which is almost five times that of an ordinary worker. If he is a senior primary school teacher, his annual income can reach two to three hundred yuan, which is almost
More than ten times that of ordinary workers.
Not to mention middle school teachers, their annual income can reach more than 500 yuan, and university teachers can even earn more than 1,000 yuan.
Of course, their income is high because the cost of studying in their early years was also high. Without such high income, they would not be able to cover the high cost of studying in their early years.
Eventually, a cycle of high tuition and high benefits was formed.
In the end, part of these school running costs will be passed on to students, and part of them will be passed on to government finances.
But even so, the Tang Empire still had no intention of lowering the salary of teachers.
When this kind of elite education was launched, we had already expected that today's results would occur. However, the Ministry of Rites of the Tang Dynasty resolutely implemented this strategy. The ultimate goal was to control the number of people receiving higher education so that today's society can digest and accept high-quality people.
Population, so that people with higher education will not be able to enter the middle and upper class society, and eventually go to rebel.
The education policy of the Tang Dynasty was implemented by Li Xuan after imitating the education systems of later countries. It was considered a relatively reasonable social division of labor and selection system.
From elementary school to middle school, to high school and then to university, some people will be eliminated at each stage, and in the end only a very small number of people will be able to go to university.
As for completely opening up higher education, don’t expect it. It is inconsistent with human social structure and behavioral patterns.
People often say that knowledge is priceless, but this sentence can actually be understood from another perspective, that is, knowledge cannot be measured by money.
When monopolized by a few people, its value is very high.
But when everyone has mastered it, it’s worthless.
To really allow all people to go to college, it is actually very simple. At most, you can spend a little more money in the first few years, and after the first few years, train enough teachers, and any room or even an open space can serve as a college classroom.
For Datang, popularizing university education is not much more difficult than popularizing primary school education.
but!
Why do the powerful people who have the dominant power in society do this?
To train a group of bastards with mud-legged skills and make them the competitors of the rich and powerful’s children?
What an international joke!
Impossible.
Only monopolized knowledge has value.
Furthermore, society also needs a division of labor, a very small number of upper-class elite leaders, a group of vested interests, and a large group of exploited classes. It is impossible for everyone to be an official and for no one to be an ordinary worker sweeping the streets.
So how to carry out social division of labor?
On origin?
That is too low-level and can easily cause unrest. The best way is to use education to carry out social division of labor.
The lower the education level, the lower the social division of labor, and the higher the education level, the higher the social division of labor. So you will see that in the Tang Dynasty, the average income of the group with higher education was dozens of times the average income of the low education group.
Even hundreds of times the phenomenon.
The imperial examination system of the pre-Ming Dynasty was almost a similar model of social division of labor, but it was more limited and not as complete as the education system of the Tang Dynasty.
At least, Datang's education system gives most people the opportunity. As long as you work hard enough and are smart enough, you can do it without spending a dime, and you can even get living allowances sent home, and eventually become a master.
Under this education policy, higher education needs to be restricted.
However, with the development of society, especially the development of industry and commerce, more and more groups with a certain level of education are needed.
This requires large-scale popularization of basic education.
This is also the reason why so much education funding in the Tang Empire was spent on basic education every year.
Educational funds and other internal affairs funds are so high. Even if Datang's fiscal revenue is large, it cannot be spent. In this critical development period of the industrial revolution, it is good that Li Xuan did not deliberately lower military expenditures.
It is impossible to increase military expenditures too much for the Army.
Not to mention the army, even if the navy wanted to build new warships, they were suppressed again and again by Li Xuan.
The naval reorganization plan proposed by the Navy at the beginning of the year was once again rejected by Li Xuan.
Because this naval reorganization plan seems to just integrate the existing chaos of the three major fleets and squadrons of the navy, and establish three major fleets: the Home Fleet, the Indian Ocean Fleet, and the Pacific Fleet. In addition to the three major fleets,
Establish several more squadrons.
But in fact, it doesn't matter if the names of these fleets change over time. The key thing is that in this reorganization plan, the Navy has proposed a plan to build a new generation of capital ships.
The actual purpose of the navy's naval reorganization plan is to build a new generation of warships.
That is seven thousand battleships.
The Navy has long had a 7,000-ton battleship plan. The basic design indicator is a new generation of battleship with a standard displacement of 7,000 tons, made entirely of steel, purely steam-powered, and equipped with rifled guns in the rear.
But when such a series of words are combined, it represents an extremely high cost.
The Navy said that this new generation of giant ships can be purchased within a million dollars!
But Li Xuan scoffed at the million-dollar cost reported by the Navy!
What a joke, when he doesn’t know the cost of the imperial ship!
Such a battleship can't be bought for not less than two million!
He knew very well what the people in the Navy were thinking. He just saw the excitement of the Army fighting in the Western Regions. In order to maintain the influence of the Navy and compete for military expenditures, he hastily came up with the Two Ocean Fleet Plan.
As for the cost of the new generation of warships, the people in the Navy know very well that the cost of building this new type of warship will be very, very high, especially the first few warships. If the high cost plus the research and development funds, it will be a
Very scary figures. For the first few battleships, if each of them could get 2 million yuan, it would be a huge expense.
After all, a cruiser of 1,800 tons now costs more than 400,000 yuan, and a battleship of less than 3,000 tons costs more than 600,000 yuan. If you tell me a 7,000-ton cruiser, it uses new technologies from head to toe.
The battleship only costs one million? Think Li Xuan is stupid.
Li Xuan knew that the Navy wanted to get started first. As long as the construction started first, they would say they ran out of money halfway through the construction, so they had to stop building it. Then they would ask for money.
But Li Xuan didn't give the navy this chance!
How can it be so easy to want a large amount of funds for no reason?