national surname chiming

Chapter 479 The worker's head tax, of course, is withheld by the boss

After Shi Kefa finished his comments, most of the other cabinet ministers had nothing to say, but Zhang Huangyan on the side kept thinking, and quickly pointed out a loophole:
"So, according to the new law, in the future, the land tax will be collected according to the actual area of ​​the land owned by the current law, and those who have paid the land tax will no longer pay the head tax. And the workers will only pay the tax according to the number of heads?
In this way, if a person with a working status does a great business and makes a lot of money, does he only pay a poll tax?In contrast, if people with agricultural registration only have two or three acres of land, the land tax they bear is actually not high. After the small tax is cancelled, the burden on these people will be greatly reduced.
In the future, will there be a large number of people who will only keep two or three acres of land under their names, and then rely on the registered land property to keep their agricultural registration and enjoy the benefits of paying only grain and no tax?In fact, after planting two or three acres of land, they go to work in the city in their free time, using the income from work as the main source of food and clothing, just to avoid taxes? "

Zhang Huang said this because he has seen that when the industrial tax is based on the head and the agricultural tax is based on the land area, for those who pay the industrial tax, the bigger the business, the smaller the actual payment ratio.On the other hand, the agricultural tax means that the less land you own, the smaller the scope of business, and the smaller the burden.

It is necessary to block the two extremes on both sides, otherwise the world will be full of speculators, big capitalists or symbolic small owner farmers everywhere, avoiding taxes at the two extremes.

After Zhu Shuren heard this, he also affirmed Zhang Huangyan's worry, saying that he asked very well.

"This is an old-fashioned problem of seeking the country, but it is not impossible to stop it. If you want to stop the industrial and commercial people from leaving a few acres of land and pretending to be a farmer to avoid taxes, you must set a minimum standard for land tax for the farmer.

It is foolish to think that every male and female is one household, and a maximum of two secondary males can be added, and those who own [-] acres of paddy fields or [-] acres of dry fields are approved as the minimum farm registration quota.If the actual land is less than this number, the land tax and grain should be paid according to the area, and if the actual land exceeds this number, the land tax and grain should be paid according to the actual land area.

If a family owns less than this number of fields, their farming labor is definitely not saturated, and they will have spare energy to do other things, such as helping those who have more fields to grow, or going to the city to work in slack.For this part of the surplus labor force, the part that should be taxed cannot escape.

On the other hand, in order to prevent those engaged in industrial and commercial business from getting a relatively lower tax burden when they do more, it is necessary to calculate the industrial and commercial tax base from multiple angles.For example, the method of "collecting silk tax according to the number of looms" used by the imperial court before must be continued.

It’s just that the machines in other industries cannot be verified yet, but the imperial court will issue a list to check the ones that are easy to check, and according to the nature of their production, if all colleagues use machines, then they must be counted according to the theoretical number of machines. Lower bound taxation.

In addition, the imperial court can also conveniently collect taxes uniformly for industrial and commercial persons who employ workers. Those who hire workers must register with the government and attach the employment relationship to the employee's household registration.

Employers who do not register their employment will be severely punished if they are found out by the imperial court!If the hired person turns out to be the first whistleblower, the hired person will be rewarded twice.

From then on, the employee's industrial and commercial tax will be paid directly by the employer.In the future, any common people in Ming Dynasty who have employment information filed with the government will not have to pay taxes directly, and the cost of tax collection by the court will be greatly reduced.
They will no longer have to deal with the people one by one like in the past when the Ding tax was collected.From now on, the government will only focus on the small group of workshop owners within their jurisdiction, and most of the country's poll tax will be paid by the workshop owners.The remaining small part is directly taxed on self-employed individuals. "

Zhu Shuren could easily think of this method.

Once there is a trend of modern industrialization, what is the most convenient way to collect poll tax?Of course, we can no longer deal with ordinary people one by one like in the era of agricultural natural economy in the feudal era, and directly ask the boss to withhold and pay, which is easy for a modern person to think of.

Only freelancers, small self-employed will be more troublesome, and they have to pay for each household.

In this way, the number of tax collectors needed by Hucao will be greatly reduced.

Of course, in order to encourage the simplification of administration, the poll tax for self-employed and freelancers must be slightly higher than that of migrant workers, so as to encourage the people to expand the scale of production and concentrate on working.

After all, the self-employed are small bosses. They already earn more than the workers, so they should pay more.Ask them to collect money. The human cost of tax collectors paid by the court is also high, and they are equivalent to bearing a part of the salary of the tax system staff.

For hundreds of years, the Ming Dynasty has been troubled by the cost of poll tax collection, and the efficiency is extremely low. A considerable part of the poll money collected is the expenses of the tax collectors themselves, and the internal friction is too serious.

Now, relying on the trend of industrialization, Zhu Shuren has directly cut the cost of poll tax collection by at least [-]%. He only needs to spend more time in the registration of population and household registration, and more records are required to record who the person's employer is.After the trouble once, it will save effort to collect money every year in the future.

For business owners, it is a bit costly to do this, because in the future, they will have to hire an accountant responsible for tax returns, which may not be a full-time job, but at least the accounting office of each workshop will have more workload and be better at mathematics.

However, with the advancement of science and technology and the innovation of education in Ming Dynasty, there will definitely be more and more mathematics talents in the future, which will definitely be able to support the transformation of Daming's financial governance to modernization.

As for how the employer will discuss the wages with the workers after paying the worker’s head tax, this is a matter between the labor and management. The employer will probably lower the wages a little to make up for the tax, but anyway, the workers get the money. Definitely more than paying taxes directly by yourself.

Still the same sentence, compared with the ancients before, Zhu Shuren is already a benevolent government.

In addition, Zhu Shuren suggested that workshop owners should not only pay head tax on their behalf according to the number of employees, but also suggested that industrial tax should be levied on machines. This has another advantage, that is, it can promote the development of advanced productivity by workshop owners.

Because, for example, taking the current Daming textile industry as an example, all looms, spinning machines, and silk reeling machines are calculated based on the same tax base.Whether it is an old-fashioned spinning machine with a single spinning wheel or a small spinning machine with at least five to eight spinning wheels, the tax is the same.

In this way, to achieve the same cotton yarn production capacity, you only need to pay the industrial tax of one machine with the Xiaowan spinning machine, while with the old-fashioned spinning machine, you may need five machines and five workers to reach the Xiaowan spinning machine One machine, one worker.

A factory owner using outdated production capacity produces the same amount of things, but pays five times the head tax and five times the machine tax. Whether he wants to go poor or not, he thinks about changing. Just weigh it yourself and stick to the old machines with outdated production capacity. Yes, just waiting to be squeezed out by peers.

……

Shi Kefa and Zhang Huangyan saw that Zhu Shuren had already thought of such details in advance, and some places that were not detailed enough were gradually refined in everyone's discussion.

Zhang Huangyan sorted out and checked for a long time, and finally found a relatively obvious problem. He couldn't help worrying:

"According to such measures, it seems to be quite strict, but it still misses a category of people. According to the current saying, anyone who has no land and cannot be registered as a farmer's register will be regarded as a worker's register, exempt from land tax. Ding tax.

And those who can be employed by others can be paid by the employer.Those who cannot find an employer are considered themselves employers, or individuals who are self-employed—but what if a person is unable to earn a living, has no one to employ, and has no land?
In the past, this kind of people would probably become refugees a hundred years before the Ming Dynasty, and it was indeed difficult to manage them. Now that there is a New Deal, can't they try to solve them together?Or give some relief to such people who are unable to find employment, or help the government to coordinate job hunting? "

Faced with this question, Zhu Shuren was stunned, he really didn't expect it at first.

This is not because he is not humane enough, but precisely because he is a modern person. He feels that if a person cannot find a job and is unemployed, he will receive relief money for a while at most, but the government cannot be blamed.

He also didn't notice that if all the landless people were classified as "work registration" in terms of household registration, there would be a problem of unemployment crowding out, which must be gradually filled in the follow-up detailed research process.

Now that Zhang Huangyan mentioned it, Zhu Shuren did not hesitate to brainstorm immediately. Not to mention, he came up with a solution in just one or two minutes:
"It's easy, isn't it just that the unemployed person is unable to pay the tax according to his work status, then the court will help him find an errand—in the future, all unemployed people will serve the court for one year, and the court will take care of their food." Clothes and lodging, pay wages back,
But it must be lower than the wages of outside hired workers, so as not to absorb skilled labor that can be hired by private workshops, and they all want to serve the iron rice bowl.The employment of corvee by the imperial court is equivalent to a minimum wage guarantee, providing a way out for those who really can't find work.

In the future, the imperial court can exempt ordinary people from corvée, regardless of their industrial or agricultural status. Instead, corvée will be converted into money and grain, which will be included in the land tax and labor tax.Gentlemen with meritorious reputations were originally exempted from military service, but later changed to pay money and exempt from military service.

The imperial court used the grain from the corvee to provide food and drink for the unemployed refugees who had been in corvee all year round, and used the money from the corvette to provide clothing, housing and allowances for the corvee refugees. Professional people do professional things.

If the number of professional corvee workers increases, the imperial court’s dredging of water conservancy roads and bridges will not require so much labor. In the future, it will be possible to select strong and disciplined people from the corvee population as appropriate, and register them as military members. Serve corvee. "

In the ancient feudal society, were you afraid that some people would squeeze out the labor force because of agriculture and could not find work?Just go to military service or corvee service!
In the future, construction work, such as building water conservancy, dredging rivers, leveling roads, building mountains and bridges, will all depend on these professional construction teams.

Those who have farmland are peasants, those who have no land and can find work are laborers, and those who have no land and cannot find work are migrant workers or soldiers.

Moreover, Zhu Shuren's arrangement also happened to allow this good governance to crush the later reforms of Yongzheng in history in an all-round way-in Yongzheng's reforms, "spending the people into the mu" is actually not the most important thing, the most important thing is "the gentry and the gentry work together as errands" One-body pays food", even those who have the reputation of a scholar are also required to pay taxes and serve corvee.

It's just that because many people are unwilling to serve corvee, they pay corvee silver instead.When this policy was first promulgated, it aroused a lot of resistance on the grounds that it was "disgraceful to the gentlemen" and that it was a humiliation for literati to do manual labor.

It’s just that in history, the Manchus relied on foreign races to rule the Central Plains, and the handle of the knife was relatively hard, so they could resist the so-called "gentle and decent" of the Han scholars and officials. But in the final analysis, Yongzheng’s reforms still created many unnecessary twists and turns.

Now Zhu Shuren, of course, will not make it difficult for himself out of thin air, so he directly announced: only people with migrant worker status will serve in corvee, and everyone else will pay more money and food to support corvee by default, so they don't have to work for the court in person.

Didn't the scholars say that doing physical work is degrading to the gentlemen?The regent didn't ask you to do manual work, he just wanted you to pay money from the beginning!Paying money is always an insult to gentleness, right?

As a result, a wave of opposition forces that would have resisted Yongzheng in history, but now they were unable to resist Zhu Shuren, disappeared directly.Even if some people still oppose the reform in the end, after the power is divided and disintegrated, there will be no waves.

……

Hearing that Zhu Shuren arranged the details so thoroughly, he even thought about how to appease and resettle the unemployed refugees and prevent Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong from being forced out again. Shi Kefa and Zhang Huangyan finally couldn't find any loopholes for the time being.

Of course, any large-scale reforms involving the whole country cannot be resolved in a few days of closed-door meetings.

Although Zhang Huangyan didn't expect it at the moment, he knew that there must be many small problems and details that had not been exposed, so he was not in favor of rushing ahead.

He made a very sincere suggestion: "I wonder when Your Highness wants this new law to be implemented? Can you extend the time for discussion and soliciting suggestions from all parties? And even if it is implemented, can you choose one province or several prefectures instead of promoting it directly across the country? Give it a try?"

Zhu Shuren affirmed this suggestion, and he nodded approvingly: "This is what it should be. According to the timetable of the Gu plan, it is already May, and the implementation plan will be discussed within two months. This year is before the summer grain tax is imposed. It was promulgated to let the household officials and tax collectors of the Ministry of Household and Yingtianfu (the mansion where Nanjing is located) learn from it, and then only pilot it within the scope of Yingtianfu.

If there are no major problems, it will be promoted to the whole of Nanzhili next year. If there are some problems, then it will be limited to the Jiangnan part of Nanzhili next year, excluding relatively poor Yangzhou, Huai'an, Fengyang and other prefectures.If the problem is serious, then rectify it, next year you can only continue to try and make mistakes within the scope of Ying Tianfu.

Once it is on the right track, it can take another year to promote it to Jiangxi and Zhejiang.After another year, I went to Huguang, Sichuan, and Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi.It will be at least five years before the south is fully implemented.

If all the response is good and there are no complaints from the people, it will be gradually promoted to the north.However, you must be cautious when going to the north. The industry and commerce in the north is not well developed and lacks the foundation. Once the people are divided into workers and peasants, I am afraid that few people will be able to find work with workers, and even if there are workers, they will become tenant farmers with workers. .

Fortunately, the population in the north is now sparsely populated. Adding up the provinces in Huaibei, excluding the Northeast, the total population is only 500 million.The fields in the north are still enough for the people to share. Farmers should generally have more than [-] to [-] acres of dry land, and it should be no problem to pay for food in peace.

It’s just that we have to beware of the population multiplying too fast in the future. If after decades of reproduction, the land is insufficient and the industry and commerce have not started, the imperial court will guide the workers to go south to work. Otherwise, the separation of workers and peasants may cause backlash. "

After Zhang Huangyan heard this, he didn't say anything, but just exchanged a glance with Shi Kefa.

Shi Kefa also nodded: "Back then, King Jinggong of the Song Dynasty was an official in Jinling for several years. Seeing that the law of uniform transfer and private borrowing was not enough, it was quite beneficial to the people in Jinling. After returning to the court, he took charge of the whole country carry out.

As everyone knows, the people in the north and the south are very different, and their sensitivity to business and industry is different, so that Sima Guang from Shanxi criticized him and insulted Lu Huiqing, Wang Jinggong's minion, as "the mind is like Fuzhou".

Your Highness can now clearly see that my Ming Dynasty has different customs for thousands of miles, and the folk customs in the north and south are very different. "

(End of this chapter)