The Dark Mage

Chapter 28: Vixie's Civil Reforms

   With the economic depression approaching day by day, Vixie found it imperative to take whatever actions were necessary for the wellbeing of the Kitsune kingdom. So, she began with having those civil servants under her command make a summary of the most used and critically important goods and services people used everyday so that she could allocate government resources more efficiently as chief executor acting in place of Inari. After all, with an economic depression approaching, the Kitsune government wouldn't have massive amounts of money and resources to waste on pointless programs and outdated regulations that no longer served any good purpose. Vixie did this also with the intent of lowering the tax burden on ordinary citizens who would also have less money during the depression while Vixie also believed a 32% tax on ordinary citizens was excessive compared to the quality of public services they were receiving. Such led her to suspect illegal activity and massive amounts of waste were going on in the beuraucracy, so she contracted a bunch of third party accountants to do a full audit of every major department and the relatives of important department leadership. And if anyone didn't comply with the audit, they would have their employment terminated immediately. After all, Vixie didn't expect certain departments to be honest about their finances after a few of the heads were arrested and thrown in prison for financial crimes when their family members were investigated. After all, a common financial crime the auditors discovered was money laundering through the relatives of high-ranking members of the departments in order to make their finances appear perfectly legal on paper.

     And it was after this discovery that many of these department heads were prosecutied for felony fraud charges and money laundering and almost universally convicted and thrown in prison. But chief executor Vixie Reddington was not satisfied with prison sentences alone but also had the wealth of those directly responsible for the financial crimes confiscated, because it was gained through illicit means. Then it was just a matter of finding new department heads and making reforms to reduce the likelihood of corruption such as the anti-nepotism laws she couldn't implement outside her regional jurisdiction until now. And although this costed the Kitsune government a decent amount of money with the audits and legal work on such a large scale, it would end up paying for itself over the time of the depression without corrupt officials covertly stealing massive amounts of citizens' resources and the finding and removal of massive amounts of wasteful spending.

      Inari would also check up on what Vixie was doing from time to time, because she wanted to see how Vixie was handling her role in her place in almost all ways except ritually. And when Inari and Vixie regularly discussed public policy, Inari agreed with Vixie's decision after seeing the summary the accountants made of how much money corrupt officials were costing her administration over time in which she believed was her money as the empress. But from Vixie's perspective, she believed she was giving back to the people what was rightfully theirs. And after just the governmental reforms alone, Vixie was able to cut the tax rate from 32% to 20% with no loss in quality but rather increase in quality with greatly reduced corruption and waste. And Inari didn't care that the tax rate was lowered so long as it didn't cut into her lavish and extravagant living standard in which it didn't.

     In response to this, nobody was complaining except the aristocracy who felt threatened now that ordinary citizens had more purchasing power and resources. And to this, many in the aristocracy paid their media propaganda lapdogs to slander Vixie, accusing her of all manner of things falsely and even so far as to absurdly accuse Vixie of being a Communist. But despite all the slander, Inari didn't believe any of it and kept Vixie in her position, because she knew from her own experience that Vixie was loyal to her country and did what she could to make it prosper and foster what she believed to be the good things in it. And that was something no ideologue purely seeking power through seizing the means of production and destroying the existing culture to impose her ideology would ever do.