Transmigrated as the Crown Prince

Chapter 664: The German-Soviet War (21)

"Brother Yanik, please help me persuade my mother. I also want to go to space."

Yannick shook his head. "Little Elizabeth, space is really dangerous, I'm not kidding. You should really listen to your mother and stay on earth."

Little Elizabeth pouted in dissatisfaction. "Then others can go up, why can't I?"

Yannick looked serious. "They set out with the great spirit of sacrificing for humanity, can you? You just think it's fun."

"I don't care! I want to go to space! I want to go to space!!" Yannick burst into laughter looking at little Elizabeth who was just rolling around on the floor and acting mischievously. "Okay, go ahead. But not everyone can go to space. You have to meet the conditions."

Little Elizabeth stood at attention with her chest raised, her face full of confidence. "No matter what the conditions are, I will meet them!"

"Oh? Then listen carefully." Yannick took the paper and pen and said while writing. "First of all, you must master relevant professional knowledge such as mechanics, biology, physics, electronics, medicine, mathematics, etc., and obtain a master's degree or above."

"Have more than 1,000 hours of flight experience, have a diving certificate, and more than 500 hours of survival training."

"You need to have good physical and mental qualities."

"You must be proficient in German. All instrument instructions and instructions are in German, but there is no English for your reference."

Little Elizabeth listened blankly to Yannick's enumeration of the requirements for becoming an astronaut, and it took her a long time to recover. "So complicated?"

Yannick tore off the paper and waved it in front of her eyes. "It's so complicated, otherwise you think anyone can go up there? What, do you want to give up? You should practice golf, skiing, horse riding, etc."

"I will pass!" Little Elizabeth shouted, snatched the paper from Yannick's hand, and ran out quickly.

In the early morning of the next day, fifty ME-264d high-altitude bombers took off from the Greenland airport and flew to the United States.

Five bombers returned one after another due to malfunctions midway, and the remaining 45 bombers entered U.S. airspace after a long flight. After a while, a group of fighter jets came up to meet them. Unfortunately, they still couldn't climb to the flying height of the bombers, so they could only follow them a few kilometers below.

"Tsk, tsk, look at these poor guys." The bombardier on an ME-264d bomber looked at the U.S. fighter jets several kilometers away below and couldn't help but mock. "These idiots might as well stay on the ground. Flying up is a waste of fuel."

In fact, American fighter pilots do not want to "humiliate themselves" like this, but they have no choice, because without their fighter jets accompanying them to intimidate them, the German bombers will unscrupulously reduce their high-precision bombing. With them here, the German bombers would not be accurate even if they dropped bombs.

"Maybe we should equip the belly machine gun, maybe we can shoot down a few fighters." As mentioned earlier, in order to pursue the ultimate high-altitude flight performance, this bomber not only uses a large amount of chromium-nickel-manganese superhard aluminum alloy, but also cancels the All self-defense weapons are not equipped with even a machine gun or a turret.

At this moment, the U.S. fighter jets could not reach them, and they could not attack these U.S. fighter jets. The two sides could only stare at each other from a distance of several thousand meters.

President Wilkie, who was holding a meeting in the White House office, received an alert of the invasion of German bombers and hurriedly went down to the bunker with everyone to take shelter. In fact, they had guessed that the German bombers were probably carrying the same carbon fiber bombs as last time, which had no direct lethality; but no one dared to be 100% sure, so they hid in the bunker just in case.

"These damn Germans are so punctual!"

Today, the United States is sparing no effort to develop in all aspects of the military. The navy wants to build warships, the army wants to build tanks, and aircraft. It even transports large quantities of materials to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease Act and has to pay large sums of pensions; all of this has led to the United States' The finances were in a precarious position.

If it gives more gold to the Germans, the United States may go bankrupt. Therefore, after everyone discussed it, they decided to adopt General Arnold's method, hoping to reduce some losses.

Listening to the cry of the newly appointed Treasury Secretary, President Wilkie frowned deeply. "It seems we have to find a way to increase fiscal revenue."

There are several main sources of national fiscal revenue: taxes, profits from state-owned enterprises, issuance of national bonds, and income from leasing other state-owned resources. Among them, taxation accounts for the largest proportion of total fiscal revenue. President Willkie naturally thought of taxation. “What about increasing taxes?”

However, this proposal was opposed by a staff member. President Roosevelt's greatest contribution after taking office was to pull the United States out of the economic crisis, including tax cuts; but now President Willkie is raising taxes just over a month after taking office, which may arouse public resentment.

Another staff member spoke. "Then we can issue war bonds again." Why do I say "again" because President Roosevelt had already issued war bonds once when he declared war on Germany.

President Wilkie nodded. "War bonds are indeed a good idea. Now that the United States is facing a critical moment of life and death, anyone with some sense will actively buy bonds."

Everyone agreed to continue issuing war bonds and began to discuss the number and denomination of issuances. After discussing for a while, everyone felt that it would be quite convenient to directly apply the bond model issued during President Roosevelt's time.

The war bonds issued during President Roosevelt's time were almost based on the original defense bonds, divided into two types: accounting and paper. In order to ensure proper circulation, bearer paper bonds were used as the main method. The denominations of the bonds were 25 and 50. , 100, 200 and so on.

Moreover, this kind of bond bears interest. An individual only needs to pay US$75 to purchase a US$25 bond. After 10 years of maturity, the government will exchange it for the full US$25. In this way, the annual interest is 3.3%. three. Anyone with a little bit of economic knowledge can see that this interest rate is not very high. If inflation breaks out within the next ten years, it will only just protect the capital.

At that time, Roosevelt issued $2 billion in bonds; but for today's U.S. finance, $2 billion is just a drop in the bucket. President Wilkie waved his hand and set an amount. "The initial issuance is US$8 billion. If the sales are good, it can be over-sold to US$10 billion."

One of the staff said worriedly. "Mr. President, is this too much?" Eight billion U.S. dollars is definitely not a small amount. Last year's U.S. GDP was only 101.4 billion U.S. dollars. This eight billion U.S. dollars is equivalent to one-twelfth of last year's GDP.

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