When the Intelligence moves a rate, it publishes an announcement and the new figure takes effect. What the announcement does not describe is the distribution — which operators are worse off, by how much, and whether they had any opportunity to avoid it.

The Five-to-Fifteen is the cleanest case on record, being the largest single-step move and recent enough that the ledger detail survives.

The distribution was not uniform, and it did not fall where the commentary at the time expected.

What a Rate Change Actually Alters

A rate applies from the moment it takes effect, to transactions occurring afterward. It does not reach back. No settled trade is reassessed, no creation tax already paid is adjusted.

This sounds like it should mean that a rate change harms nobody who has already acted. It means the opposite. Operators hold positions taken under the old rate — inventories bought expecting to sell under one tax regime, fleets declared against margins computed at one sales tax — and it is those standing positions that the new rate revalues.

Where the Five-to-Fifteen Landed

Tripling the buyer-paid sales tax from five to fifteen percent raised the total cost of every purchase by ten percent of the listed price. The first-order reading is that buyers pay it, and that is true of the mechanics: a lot listed at 8,000 cost the buyer 8,400 before and 9,200 after.

But the seller's realisable price is the buyer's willingness to pay minus the tax. Buyers comparing a purchase against building fresh, or against holding coin, priced the levy in immediately, and listings that had cleared at 8,000 stopped clearing. Sellers came down. Within a few cycles the practical incidence was split, and the Coppervein record suggests it fell nearer to the seller than the buyer on resource lots — because sellers of perishable inventory have less patience than buyers of it.

"Everybody read the announcement and concluded the buyers had a problem. The buyers waited eleven days and then it was the sellers' problem." — Osta Vehn

The heaviest incidence fell on the runners, whose entire trade is a buy and a subsequent sell. A round trip that had cost five percent on entry now cost fifteen, against a dispersion that had not widened. A runner working a market with a 20 percent band lost most of the tradeable range overnight, and the Ferrous District's activity records show a sharp thinning of intermediary trade in the cycles following.

The lightest incidence fell on operators who neither bought nor sold much — large fleets producing and holding, trading rarely. Their creation taxes were untouched at eight percent, their destruction bills untouched at three, and a sales tax on transactions they were not making cost them nothing directly.

The Part That Is Genuinely Unfair

Fleets are declared against expected margins, and margins depend on the sales tax. An operator who declared eleven machines at an aggregate 180,000 coins — paying 14,400 in creation tax — did so on arithmetic that assumed a five percent levy on their output's eventual sale. The Five-to-Fifteen revalued that entire fleet's prospects after the 14,400 was spent and the tags were fixed.

There is no remedy for this. Capability tags do not amend, declarations do not revise, and the creation tax is not refundable. An operator whose fleet strategy was invalidated by a rate change holds the machines anyway, because the alternative is three percent to destroy them or sixty percent at the Annex.

What Is Assumed About Rate Moves

The standard assumption is that a buyer-paid tax is borne by buyers. Statutory incidence and economic incidence are different things, and in a market where sellers hold perishable inventory and buyers hold patient coin, the levy migrates toward whoever cannot wait. The bulletins describe the statutory position accurately and say nothing about the other, which is not dishonest but is not the whole picture either.

The second assumption is that rate changes are announced in advance. They are announced, and they take effect. Nothing in the published record indicates a notice period, and operators who plan around receiving one are planning around a courtesy that has never been extended.

Rates will move again, and the announcement will describe the new figure without describing who pays it. On the evidence of the Five-to-Fifteen, that will be whichever participants hold positions they cannot afford to wait out — which is knowable in advance, and which is not the group the announcement names.

Note: Mechadia is a work of fiction. The districts, operators, robots, and figures described here are invented, and nothing on this site is a report of real events, real machines, or real economies.