"almost literally every MfD player" said:
What do the economics of the Land of Fire look like? What are the terms of our mortgage? How much money do we have?
Rejoice, for the answers are available!
In a fine example of gratitude
and preemptively throwing people under the bus, we would like to state that
@Evenstar and
@Rihaku are responsible for the
vast majority of the following, without them it would not have happened, and
if there turns out to be anything wrong with it then it's absolutely their fault and not ours we are extremely grateful. +20 XP as a thank-you to both of you. You guys rock.
We aren't going to make the actual spreadsheets public, since it's mostly specifics that Hazō doesn't have, but here's the key details. Recall that 10 ryō (R10) = 1 US dollar ($1):
The Gōketsu warchest
You have R10,000,000 in the bank right now. This includes every source of money that the clan and its component individuals have ever received.
The Gōketsu mortgage
In mint condition, your property would be worth R102,300,000.
Jiraiya got it half off, with a 10-year mortgage of R51,150,000 principal with a R5,000,000 down payment and a 12.5% annual interest rate.
Your monthly mortgage payment is R675,526 according to the mortgage calculator website we plugged the numbers into. +1 XP if someone digs through the timeline and figures out the date on which the mortgage was taken out so we know how much of it has been paid off.
The market price of seals
Price per Jounin-Grade Seal Element R2290
Price per Chunin-Grade Seal Element R760
Price per Genin-Grade Seal Element R250
Explosive tags and storage seals are 1 element, Air/Earth Domes are 2, and Five Seal Barriers are (unsurprisingly) 5. Skywalkers are just Air Domes (2 elements each) and need to be used in pairs, meaning that a skywalker is effectively 4 elements.
(Kagome is rated as a chūnin-grade sealmaster. Hazō is rated genin-grade. Getting upgraded is a process the details of which are firmly HDK for now.)
An average till'n'fill mission is R500-2,000 ($50-200), meaning that using 2 explosives eats all the pay for a low-end TNF.
Note that not all seals can be made by all sealsmiths, because that person either isn't skilled enough to learn the seal or simply hasn't done so. This should really influence prices, but we aren't going to worry about it in most cases since that's a little more fussy than we want to get / have the skills to get. We'll probably add a bit of fuzzing where appropriate so it doesn't look like everything is completely deterministic, but these are the basic numbers that you can plan around.
Taxes: How do they work?!
There are eight general classes of people in the Land of Fire: Rural farmers, urban farmers (i.e., farmers who live inside the walls of Leaf or one of the major cities), non-farm workers, the nobility (the Daimyo and the local lords), the Hokage, clan ninja, clanless jōnin, and clanless ninja (meaning the genin, chūnin, and special jōnin who are not clan ninja). Taxes flow like this, with some money sticking at each level:
Rural farmers > Local lords > Daimyo > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin
Urbanites (farmer and not) > Daimyo > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin
All ninja > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin
Tax rate for all ninja is 80%, with the first R42,400 (i.e. annual subsistence income for a ninja) not taxed. See below about refunds for clans.
The essence of this is that the Hokage rules everything and bribes the clans + clanless jōnin to keep them loyal to Leaf, the Daimyo and nobles are glorified tax collectors, and clanless ninja get screwed.
The money that goes to clans / clanless jōnin is paid 10% as a non-conditional cash transfer to the Clan Head / jōnin and the other 90% is in the form of conditional payments -- equipment allotments, tax refunds, bonuses to mission pay, etc. (See below for more.) The large majority of the non-conditional cash payment is typically used on clan investments, etc with only a small (or zero) allowance to each ninja.
(NB: Clanless ninja receive an equipment issue each month from the Tower's discretionary fund. The recipient can choose how to allocate the funds and will typically spend it on a couple of explosive tags unless they really need new uniforms, kunai, etc. Again, any monies not spent go into the Tower's discretionary fund.)
The benefits money is not divided evenly. By law, the 8 founding clans (Senju, Hyūga, Aburame, Inuzuka, Uchiha, Nara, Akimichi, Yamanaka) receive 70% of the money; the remaining 30% is divided among the non-founding clans (including the Gōketsu) and clanless jōnin.
Hazō has not been shown to know any of this onscreen, nor have we shown him getting registered to receive the Gōketsu stipends. We don't want to waste time with that, so we'll assume it's what he's been doing with his timeskipped hours since getting back from the Exams.
This means that he has not had time for seal research.
Legal implications of the above
The money paid from the Tower to the clans is a fixed pool and awarded on a per-ninja basis. That means that the payments are zero-sum. When the Gōketsu were formed it cost all the other non-founding clans money and every time the Gōketsu adopt a clanless ninja the Gōketsu clan receives more money and every other non-founding clan ninja / clanless jōnin receives less money. Similarly, when Keiko stopped being a Gōketsu and became a Nara, some of the stipend that you had been receiving got taken away from you and given to the Nara.
Based on this, we have decided that there are laws saying no clan may add more than 2 clanless ninja per year to their ranks. Ninja may transfer freely between clans, since that doesn't affect anyone else. (Note: We had not realized that these laws needed to exist, so an IRL month ago you would have been free to adopt as many clanless ninja as you liked. Hazards of asking us to work out a consistent economic system.) Naruto obviously does not count against your 2-ninja allotment, since he's a clan ninja.
Gōketsu income
There's some income from selling seals. We haven't figured out the numbers yet.
The Gōketsu receive a maximum total value of R382,700 per month (R76,540 per ninja * 5 ninja (Hazō, Noburi, Akane, Mari, Kagome)) from the Tower. This is divided into 10% non-conditional payment and 90% conditional payments, as follows:
- R38,270 : Non-conditional monthly cash stipend from the Tower bureaucracy, paid directly to Hazō as Clan Head.
- R344,430 : Maximum monthly value of conditional payments (CP), divided as follows. NOTE: Any portion of these that is not used will be retained by the Tower as part of its discretionary budget. There's no carryover.
- Up to R258,322 (75% of CP): 50% bonus to mission pay + tax refund. All ninja face an 80% tax on their mission pay above the untaxed R42,400 annual subsistence rate; the tax is paid at the point of payment, meaning that if the client is paying R100 for a mission then you actually receive R20. If you are a clan ninja then the following month's benefits payment to your clan will include an extra R50 (50% bonus on the mission price) + R80 (refund of the tax). This makes it look as though it's fair to both clan and clanless while hiding the fact that clans are getting paid extra and aren't actually paying the tax.
- Up to R51,644 (15% of CP): Equipment draw at Tower rates. This generally means seals, since all other ninja equipment is pretty cheap. In all cases, the Tower has discretion over what it can be used on. You still have to pay your monthly tax in seals and then provide first refusal on all other seals, but you can then immediately buy the seals back at the same rate you were paid by the Tower.
- Up to R34,430 (10% of CP): Various other things that will probably come up but we haven't thought of. Suggestions welcome.
Things the Gōketsu want to do with their money
The Hagoromo have a large but unspecified debt to the Hyūga that is giving the latter a lot of control over the Hagoromo. If the Gōketsu agree to pay the Hagoromo R2,000,000/month for the next 15 years, the Hagoromo agree that in the upcoming election for Hokage they will vote for whomever the Gōketsu tell them to vote for. They have expressed an extremely strong preference that this be anyone other than Hyūga.
EDIT: Original language referred to the "conditional payments" as "non-monetary benefits", which is not correct. They are in fact cash, it's simply that you only get the cash if you do missions etc.
