1874-1876 (Part 1) – Spiros: Money, Money, Money
The second two years of the ‘72 term drew a fairly stark contrast to the first two, which had been notable for their intrinsic lack of governmental action and permeated by high profile battles in the Supreme Court: for two years, government became all about the money. With the quarter of million pounds worth of debt built up over the course of the Wallachian War still hanging over the treasury, Spiros’s chief aim was to put the nation back in the black by the election season; an ambition he achieved comfortably thanks to an unpopular, if effective, 5% increase on taxes across the board. Though under the new constitution, the explicit power for the control of government finances was left to Congress alone, there was little opposition in either house to a series of acts in the wake of the convention granting day-to-day controls to the Treasury, meaning the Presidency could act independently of Congress should they not wish to interfere – it seems likely that had Spiros been forced to enact his budgets in the legislature, he would have struggled to get the increase on the books, which was naturally unpopular thanks to putting the headline rate of tax at fairly staggering 65% (though the effective tax rate was almost certainly far lower thanks to the numerous exceptions and loopholes which already riddled the tax system and the unfortunate scale of tax evasion, that had been little curbed despite the best efforts of successive governments). A backbench proposal which would have forced the government to pass an annual budget in the National Assembly failed thanks to the scandalous “efficiency” measures taken by the Deputy who tabled the act – there was, however, no guarantee for whoever won the election that Congress would take quite such a relaxed attitude to fiscal issues in the future.
The President, meanwhile, was putting his new found wealth to good use. In August of the same year, £100,000 of debt was paid off by the Treasury, in the process wiping all of the bonds held by foreign nationals. The remainder of the bonds, which were distributed by the Bank of Austria (which had also been the Federal Central Bank since 1855), were paid off on New Year’s Eve, 1875, just five days before the nation went to the polls. Ironically, the vast majority of foreign debt held by the Bank of Austria was that of the Russians, who had been the main player in giving Sprios the debts he was now dealing with, and who now needed funds to bankroll their war to expand their territories in China, by taking yet more of the area south of Beijing. The new surplus of money was also fed back into spending programme; for example, the construction of the 2,000-mile long Dniester line (so named because it approximately followed the valley of the Dniester Rivier) at the behest of the Minister of War, as a replacement for the aging Severní Obranné Linie (‘Northern Line of Defence’) cost at least £150,000, even though in reality it was more of an addition to the pre-existing defences, and an expansion of the defence-system to the East into Moldavia. On top of this, several strategically important points, mainly important ports and coastal cities like Melilla and Dubrovnik, but also the entire length of the Suez Canal, got major investment in their naval facilities and their defences, both from sea and from land. In spite of all of this spending on infrastructure, with the Dniester Line being the largest single governmental project during the entire term, the most publicised of all was surely the replacement of the Red Star Fleet. Since the peace established at Berlin just eight years before, the Danubian naval supremacy that had kept British forces out of the Mediterranean had slipped slowly but steadily away: the original breed of
Dalmat-class Ironclads were rusting into oblivion after having taking a beating in Gibraltar from which they would never really recover, yet they were to remain in service for the foreseeable future as guardians of Suez; while President Valenta’s legacy scheme to build 30 new Ironclads over a decade, the Naval Armament and Modernization Program of 1867, folded due to lack of funds just a year later despite never formally being shut down; furthermore, the fact that the technological advances made in the 1860’s had not been replicated in later decades, combined the lack of investment in the infrastructure since the Federation’s foundation, with most port facilities dating from the Habsburg-era if not older, left the Federation a relative backwater without the advantage that early implementation gave; and all the while, the nation’s competitors, not least the Russians, had been working at strengthening their hand in the region, as had been evidenced by plenty of defeats to Russian fleets in the Black Sea not so long before. In 1866, no-one believed the Federation had the naval strength to repel the Royal Navy for a sustained period, because the British had been more or less undisputed masters of the waves for a century. Less than a decade later, no-one believed the Federation had the naval strength to repel the Royal Navy for any period at all, even after the fearsome reputation of Her Majesty’s armed forces had been brutally shattered. To rectify this, President Spiros commissioned the construction of 11 new Monitors: small, shallow-draft ships that were neither extremely fast nor overpoweringly armed, but being both relatively manoeuvrable and strong in relation to their size, they were a good compromise between the cumbersome Ironclads that were the current mainstay of the Federal Navy and the Commerce Raiders that preceded them. The first such ship,
DBS Csikós, was launched from Dubrovnik on Boxing Day 1864. She was named after the mounted horse-herdsman of Hungary due to, according to official sources, the record breaking speeds she achieved – this was later to be proved wrong, as the actual records from her sea trials were uncovered in 2001, stating her top speed was only 12 knots, less than that achieved by the now 15-year old
Novara-class light ships of the Adriatic Protection Fleet; nonetheless, the myth stuck, and when the last of the old Man’o’Wars were decommissioned in late 1876, the Red Star Fleet adopted the slogan, ”
Aenean quam ventus“ (“Faster than the Wind”).
1. The
USS Passaic, upon which the Federation's new monitors were based.
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Since I am going away for the weekend, this update will be serialised. The second half the update, dealing with foreign affairs and social issues will hopefully follow on Monday, as shall pictures for this.
In the meantime, you may have noticed that it is election season once more (more details on the new voting system for Presidential Elections will also follow at some point), but for now
please announce your candidacy along with the party you with to run under the banner of (or if you wish to run as an independent) and a full list of the five in-game policies your government would have were it to be elected.
Also, please vote on the Appointment Act of 1874. (For my sanity, I just took the other act there as a Presidential order)
Ensure that you include your state in your vote if you want it to be counted.
The deadline will be Monday 20th at 8pm GMT.