As time passed, more and more agency heads rose and delivered their reports. There were no breaks, or even significant pauses, as the emperor himself was present. His face was unchanging and his attention remained focused throughout the marathon council session.
As report after report was delivered, uninvolved people were finally witnessing the scale at which the empire operated. Many agencies were previously completely unknown to most, as their tasks were generally performed in the background, like the imperial waste management agency. Pre-empire, not many people considered the fact that waste management—garbage and recycling pickup, sewage treatment, and so forth—was a function of their local government, but now that every government function had been centralized, it was made apparent.
Along with that, many other things were now operated by the state as well. Things like power, water, and the few remaining places that relied on natural gas had been absorbed into the imperial utility agency. Cellphones and other communications services were rolled into the imperial internet agency, and many, many more functions that had once been under private management were now operated by the empire.
It proved a boon for many people, as governments in general were not-for-profit organizations and had no issues operating at a loss so long as it benefited the citizens. Government organizations were an exception to the truism that monopolies made the people suffer, and as long as corruption remained minimal or nonexistent, there would be no issues like those arising from communist and socialist societies in the mid to late 20th century, BE (Before Empire).
There was naturally still room for capitalism to exist, and for profit to be made by private individuals, but they could no longer profit off things that the empire had deemed as essential to a functioning society. So most of the profit was driven by retail and the service industry, as well as entertainment and media corporations. With most of the research now being done in Research City, where quite literally anyone could open a lab, innovation had already begun booming as people with Big Ideas could now realize those ideas and profit from them.
Even some economists had noted the trend and predicted an invention boom, as the imperial government was handing down things like tax exemptions and credits for innovative inventions that either stimulated the economy or benefited the people in some way, as well as preferential profit splits when it came time to manufacture the new inventions.
Once the smaller agencies had finished their reports, the only agencies left were the true juggernauts: the imperial treasury agency, imperial justice agency, imperial works agency, imperial police agency, and so on. Plus the ministers themselves—exterior, interior, and war.
The only person who would never deliver a public report was the head of the imperial intelligence agency, or The Tourist. He, or she, was also the only person in the council chamber that had their appearance disguised, so that everyone who looked at him or her saw them as a different person. It was a small flex on Nyx’s part, and she was quite satisfied by the effect it had in practice.
The head of the treasury was the first juggernaut to report. He rose to his feet and immediately dove into the meat of the matter. “The fiscal year budget has been drafted and preliminarily approved pending the emperor’s signature. The exact breakdown is now available in the Akashic Record, but I’ll give a brief overview here.
“Our total expenditure this year is fifty trillion Earth New Dollars. Twenty trillion of that is the public defense burden, of which the imperial family is covering seventy percent, as promised. The remainder of the budget is social welfare and subsidy programs, the details of which you can find in the Akashic Record.”
He continued speaking, disclosing the budget allocated to each ministry and how it would be spent on the agency projects under those ministries. The biggest single expenditure was, naturally, the ministry of war—which consumed a whopping forty percent of the total budget—but that was heavily subsidized by Aron’s private investment into that budget, thus lowering the public burden to a much more reasonable six trillion END.
The shock people felt wasn’t just about Aron’s ability to pay 14 trillion END into the public treasury, but also the sheer amount of it. Comparing the spending power of the END to the previous most valuable currency, the USD, the total budget of the Terran Empire was more than the global GDP from before the empire’s founding combined!
Economists took that as a good sign of a healthy economy, while laypersons in the general populace were just staggered by the sheer numbers. As most mathematicians could tell you, abstract numbers that can’t be easily visualized by people are impossible to understand. Numbers that could be easily visualized, though, were very easy to understand.
For example, the number ten is easily visualized; it’s the number of fingers most people have. Twenty is visualized as fingers and toes, twenty-one as fingers, toes, and another part of the anatomy. Maybe people went to school where their classrooms held thirty people, or attended lectures in a lecture hall that held a hundred-odd people.
But dealing with numbers that are too big boils down to generalizing them into categories, like “a lot” or “a whole lot”, making numbers of sufficient size too abstract to be useful for anything but mathematicians. And numbers in the trillions absolutely fit the description of a number that’s too big to deal with for practically everyone.
(Ed note: Penn & Teller had a show that aired from 2003-2010 called “Bullshit!” where they examined a lot of bullshit theories and beliefs. Season 4, episode 5 explored the concept of numbers and math and how it could be used to manipulate people. I tried finding the cold open clip on YouTube, but apparently it’s been taken down as the show is now streaming on Paramount+, but if you can find it, it’s a really good—and funny—watch.)
When the imperial treasury progress report was done, the councilor yielded the floor back to Gaia and retook his seat.
[Next agency on the docket is the imperial blessings agency. Councilor Ross, the floor is yours,] Gaia announced.
