kzt wrote:Sorry, the doctor walked in as I was doing that last post.
What I meant to say was that it is implied far more than the SLN budget gets stolen by corrupt officials every year. And the SLN was said to be a small fraction of the SL budget. And the SLN isn't shown to be spending vast amounts of money. They are not building dozens of ultramodern new shipyards, building vast R&D sites like WW2's Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, or thousands of new ships or even deploying tens of millions of system defense missiles in all their major systems.
They are shown as buying COTS products from their usual vendors. Who are kind of in the situation of J. Paul Getty's bank whose customer owes them 100 million dollars.
I agree they are somewhat innovative products, but they were created by the vendor. Is the money all being stolen? Didn't they shut down battle fleet, which should free up a bunch of funds?
(And consider this: if the SLN had sent the same number of SDs to Hypatia vs BCs, what would the outcome have been?)
There just hasn't been enough time to run the government out of money. Heck, they haven't even organized the mass arrests of the wreckers, profiteers and saboteurs, much less the show trials. As Venezuela shows, there is a lot of ruin in even small nation.
I think you misunderstood at least part of what was being said. The SLN was a very
large part of the federal budget. indeed, combined with OFS, it accounted for a clear majority of the budget. The budget, however, accounted for a miniscule portion of the total League's GDP. Now, a lot of the money that was in the budget for those items did disappear into graft and corruption, but they were also spending huge sums (as compared to peacetime spending) on new missiles and weapon systems (there is a
hell of a lot of crash R&D going on in the course of this book), bringing existing BCs out of mothballs, laying down major new construction programs, etc., etc. I don't take you through all of this inch-by-inch or item by item, but the federal government's spending has gone up enormously at the very moment that the Manties have succeeded in chopping most of their legal income stream off at the knees. Without getting into spoilers, they
do see a way to turn the revenue spigot back on in the course of this book, and it works just fine, except . . . well. . . .
The key point is that in terms of annual budget, the federal government , like many a government before it, was actually running a deficit (fairly modest in scope) before the situation with the Manties blew up. That meant that there weren't a huge amount of existing reserve funds that could be shifted around. Oh, the actual amounts that could be shifted were pretty spectacular in absolute terms, but not very impressive at all in the face of their new expenditures
and their need to maintain essential programs which already existed. We only see them primarily in terms of their military commitments, but somehow they had to go on funding at least minimal levels for all their other essential programs . . . like all those OFS governorships and intervention battalions.
When the shooting started, they had to mobilize their naval forces (and they started out by de-mothballing a stack of SDs which then turned out to be pretty useless and got put back to bed). When they realized how useless their wallers were going to bem they tuned to their BCs and started moving FF units over to BF, which took time and cost money. They basically through out their entire missile inventory after what happened to Crandall --- Filaretta still had a bunch of conventional missiles in his capital ship magazines; nobody after him did --- which also cost a bunch of money. They had to commit to their new construction programs . . . which cost a bunch of money. And the financial markets
knew what Lacoon was doing to the federal revenue stream, which is why the Treasury found its bond issues tanking and interest rates soaring.
Lacoon could not possibly have killed the SL's economy, but it didn't have to to kill the SL
government because of the nature of its funding mechanism.
I should probably also point out that the feds never actually crashed (don't suppose that's much of a spoiler) although they were clearly in a fiscal death spiral. Indeed, much of the Mandarins' desperation was because they
knew they were in a death spiral. And the real killer for them was that --- at least prior to certain events elsewhere --- they couldn't
admit they were to the League at large. They couldn't directly tax the League's citizens without a constitutional amendment; they couldn't ask for a constitutional amendment without admitting what was going on; and they knew damned well that at least some of the member system governments would refuse to support any such amendment (thus killing it deader than dead, using their individual veto power) because they didn't want the Feds' fingers in their pockets and because whatever happened to the federal government, the
individual systems knew they did not, in fact, face an existential threat. So the Mandarins were in the horrible position of knowing the SLN was at war but the Solarian League was at the mall
and if they explained the situation to the elecotrate at large the wheels came off. They couldn't fix the problem the Manties had given them without admitting the problem existed and explaining the reasons it did to people who had no interest in paying a bunch of kleptocratic bureaucrats out of their
own pockets if the Protectorates were no longer around to be squeezed.
All the money the Mandarins would ever need was right there, within easy reach, but they dared not ask for it. And they sure as heck dared not start any sort of ruthless, emergency program of arrests and prosecutions or confiscations within the League itself for two reasons. (1) They lacked the both the constitutional authority and the institutional structure to do anything of the sort. (2) If they did, all those sleeping member systems would wake up and realize Beowulf was telling the truth all along. And then, of course, there's the little matter of how Hypatia is likely to play.
Buccaneer is a
huge mistake, embraced by 5 panicked bureaucrats after it was fed to them, in no small part, by agents of the MA, and they never really expected Hajdu to kill several million Solarian citizens in the process of executing it. Of course, that was partly because they never really thought it through, and the reason they didn't was because they saw the ship inevitably sinking out from under them and they were lashing out to try to stop something they secretly --- as in secret even from themselves --- knew was
unstoppable.
Of course, such drastic measures were not needed against upstart neobarbs like Manticore or the GA.