"I must confess, I have not yet perused the report. Thank you Minister Miroslav for this information. If I may ask, do we have a list of merchants who deal in food and the like? Could we potentially lower their taxes if they agree to distribute their goods amongst the starving? This way, we don't actually have to announce another tax, as will as allowing the merchants a higher profit for later investment."
"As for you, Your Excellency, I suppose I cannot sway you from these policies. Regardless, I shall report any sedition that becomes apparent to me. That said, is there any one area I ought pay attention to? My network has mostly focused on domestic matters, especially in the North of late."
"The Ministry of the Economy itself, which is separate for the Taxation Service, is understaffed and at the time we were running a large number of different reports. As such, we were unable to get the names of specific companies. Further, as our great Dictator mentioned, our taxes are mainly upon land, not the merchants."
"However, if we create a general deduction for charity work to taxes, we could get more than just the food companies. Say, if they donate a sum equal to one-sixth of their taxes, without deductions, to a government accredited charity, then they can deduct 25% of their taxes, causing them to pay at a rate of 15% taxes rather than 20% taxes, while putting roughly 3.33% of taxes to charities. We would set that to the maximum drop, of course, with the deduction scaling linearly. We could even have this open to the common man, so they would pay into the charities as well. While this would both require us to set up a department in one of the ministries to handle accrediting the charities, likely one close to the police so they can investigate fraud, as well as the creation of a governmental seal the charities would use to show they are accredited, this could go a bit to solving the problem without forcing us to have a major jump in expenditures running the organizations ourselves would cause."
"Though speaking of the north, I have a question for you, Minister Camila. During the last meeting, I had mentioned to the Dictator that the blockade may have been caused by the West Administration, due to us having apparently declared war on them when Lord Warr took territory from them not too long ago and had not sent any diplomats to them. Do you have any information on whether this theory may be true? All I am certain of on the topic is the blockade seems focused on the northern cities that only the West Administration borders, Lord Warr had taken territory from them, and we have not had any diplomatic contact with them."