Rate-History Record — The Excavated Tax Trajectory

The register carries each engraved schedule as its own statute (LP-071 → LP-072 → LP-073 → LP-074). The failed original petition remains a refusal, not a stratum. The later LP-074 conditional statute is distinct and became the current stratum after certification.

LP-074 passed 5–0 in 2278, the original 2279–2288 Path 2 window lawfully closed without a run, and LP-075 compelled the remedial process in 2291. The final 2294 record passed Findings I–IV and independently passed B1–B6. Both schedules certified and valid notice made the exact cascade effective in 2295.

The $10,000,000 earned-income threshold has been unchanged since it was introduced with the layered schedule; the founding cap predates it, taxing net worth rather than income. Era-year boundaries Y47 (SCM transfer) and Y112 (the abundance petition) are set by record convention, as is the Foundation/Confiscation split at Y11.

The band-to-point precision arc

The two founding strata governed by bands — a range within which each layer's authority set posture annually. Bands were not imprecision for its own sake; they were what a young institution could honestly enforce. At 18f771d the layered schedule still read "90–99% / 45–50% / 20–25% / 10–15%," a range per layer, because enforcement capability had not yet matured to the point where a single number could be held.

At 5c3a0f6 the bands were cut to points in a single restructure — 70 / 35 / 17 / 8, a rounded point-halving cascade. Band-to-point is itself doctrine: point rates are what a matured enforcement capability produces. That historical schedule held through 2294. LP-074 then established the exact 50 / 25 / 12.5 / 6.25 mathematical cascade after its evidence gates cleared.

The one-million-to-present population arc

The founding-era record numbers the civilization at roughly one million citizens — the same figure that anchors the earliest Savings Circulation Mandate parameters (a $100,000-per-citizen average savings balance reading as $100 billion in aggregate across one million citizens). At that scale, taxing accumulated wealth at a single blunt rate was sufficient: there were few enough concentration vectors that one instrument could watch them all.

As the population and its economy grew, no single blunt instrument could carry all three of taxation's founding functions — revenue, anti-concentration, and trust. The layered schedule split the burden across the layers by benefit received; the SCM then lifted anti-concentration off the marginal rate entirely. Each widening of the civilization retired a job the tax rate had been doing alone, and each retirement let the rate fall. The trajectory down is the trace of the institution outgrowing its own crutches.

Era artifacts — the 70-schedule period

The Consolidation-era rate (70 / 35 / 17 / 8) is the schedule under which the civilization's Doctrine-Snapshot v14.5 simulations were authored. These cards are pinned artifacts of that stratum and are never revised to track the schedule — they show the world as it stood at the 70-rate:

• The Wealth Ceiling — Sera Voss, the neural-diving composer grossing $200M who keeps $60M at the 70% top marginal rate; the canonical illustration of the elite-wealth market the point schedule was tuned to permit while the SCM prevents concentration.
• The Cradle Offensive and The Border Audit — the other two v14.5 civilizational snapshots of the same period.

Doctrine-Snapshot-stamped simulations are era-pinned by design and are left exactly as engraved. They are historical records of the 70-schedule period, not descriptions of the current rate; no historical result is recalculated when a later schedule changes.

The succession chain — the fourth and fifth beats

Each replaced stratum is superseded, not erased — the record keeps where the civilization stood at each stage, and why it moved on. The current rate authority is LP-074 at 50 / 25 / 12.5 / 6.25, together with the 2294 Path 2 certificates and valid effective notice. LP-073 is historical.

The arc has a fourth beat, and it is not a supersession — it is a refusal. A petition to halve the cascade once more was filed on an abundance argument, and it went to the chambers and lost. The gauntlet returned 1–4. An advocacy review, argued cold with every citation verified, re-ran the vote and moved three chambers — Court, Sanctuary, and Main — reaching 3–2. Enactment requires zero failing chambers. Meritboard and Lower held, and the schedule did not move.

That is the beat worth reading closely, because nothing happened and the nothing was the point. The chambers were not asked whether rates should fall; they were asked whether these rates should fall now, on the evidence presented. They judged the evidence authored rather than audited, and declined. Preserving the defeated 2213 challenger beside the enacted strata makes the record honest: the civilization has a direction of travel and still makes itself prove each step.

The contest's literature is preserved in full. The opposition brief that held two chambers at both adjudications, the advocacy brief that moved three, and the supplemental steelman registered after the vote closed all publish in perpetuity at the Ratification Record. A failed petition is not an embarrassment to be tidied away; under standing doctrine it is a boundary marker, and the briefs are how the civilization remembers where the boundary was drawn and why.

The fifth beat is the answer to the fourth, and it took sixty-three years to write. At approximately Y175 (2276) a successor line was filed — not a resubmission, which the closed line does not permit, but a new petition built on what the refusal had established. It passed its gauntlet 5–0: LP-074, the first zero-fail law of the rate line, and the register's first conditional rate law.

What makes it the answer is how it passed. The Y112 (2213) objections were not out-argued across six decades of rebuttal; they were structurally removed. The chambers had refused to vote authored fiscal facts true, so the successor stopped asking them to — it separates the chambers' legal judgment from the audit's factual judgment entirely. The chambers vote the rule; the standing audit finds the facts; and the rule commences only if and when the facts arrive. Every authored magnitude from the old record is quarantined as legally incapable of activating anything, which converts the old petition's fatal dependency into an inadmissibility. The objection was never answered. It was made impossible to raise.

The first Path 2 window (2279–2288) closed without a run under the original no-duty rule. In 2289, that lawful silence became a public legitimacy dispute: Sanctuary reformers objected to a silent veto; Main objected to a law that could not be tested; institutional defenders answered that no duty had been adopted; and Lower observers demanded that Schedule B remain separately protected. LP-075 resolved the procedure in 2291, not the result. Its remedial run locked in 2292 and published in 2294.

The final result is a lawful activation. Findings I–IV passed with modest margins and Schedule A certified. The distinct Lower Incidence audit then passed B1–B6 and Schedule B certified. Valid notice made the full exact cascade effective in 2295. The tax cut increases first-pass private allocation while SCM remains the secondary circulation and anti-idle-wealth envelope.

The era rhythm — a lengthening institutional half-life

Read the trajectory by its intervals rather than its rates and a second pattern surfaces. The civilization's structural tax moments are spaced 12, 35, and 65 years apart — Y0 to the layered schedule at Y12; Y12 to the point cascade at Y47; Y47 to the abundance petition at Y112. Each interval is roughly double the one before it.

That is an institutional half-life lengthening as maturity deepens. A young civilization rewrites its tax posture every decade because it is still discovering what the instrument is for; a mature one goes two generations between structural questions because the answers keep holding. The spacing is not drift or neglect — it is the same fact the band-to-point arc records, read on the time axis instead of the precision axis. Institutions that work are revisited less often.

The fifth beat lands on that rhythm. The refile at approximately Y175 (2276) comes 63 years after the Y112 (2213) failure — the same ~65-year cadence the lengthening had reached, arriving almost exactly on schedule. The interval stopped doubling and settled, which is its own kind of information: the civilization now returns to its rate posture about twice a century, and did so this time not because anything broke but because six decades of preregistered audit data had finally accumulated enough to make the question answerable. The clock that governs this record is evidentiary, not political.

The Consolidation Era held through 2294 and was superseded in 2295 by the Exact Halving-Cascade Era. Era-year boundaries remain record convention; the intervals above are measured between structural moments (Y12, Y47, Y112, ~Y175), not between era labels, and the third figure — 65 — measures the point cascade’s engraving to its first challenge rather than the duration of the operative rate era.

The through-line — the Trajectory Doctrine

The direction outlived the petition that failed to advance it. Top marginal rates track demonstrated institutional need. Taxation's three founding functions — revenue, anti-concentration, and trust — each retire as automation revenue, structural anti-concentration instruments, and a verified institutional track record respectively mature. Rates ratchet down as functions demonstrably retire. That logic shaped the v14.5 transition, when the Savings Circulation Mandate took anti-concentration off the marginal rate and the founding bands were cut to points on those grounds.

The doctrine was endorsed 5–0 across the ratification chambers. That margin is the most legible fact on this page: the same chambers that refused the reduction endorsed the principle behind it unanimously. The objection was never to the direction of travel — it was to being told the facts rather than shown them. Detached from a specific cut and its authored evidence, the direction was never in dispute.

Under the doctrine, any rate reduction requires audited evidence per the Path 2 standing audit — never authored facts — at the standard zero-fail threshold. LP-074 wrote the condition into law; LP-075 ensured the test could not be silently avoided; and the final 2294 disposition supplied the required answer: Findings I–IV passed, Schedule A certified, B1–B6 independently passed, and Schedule B certified. The Y112 line itself closed as the single failed predecessor and was never reopened — the successor is a new line, not a resubmission, which is the distinction the closed-line rule exists to protect.

The trajectory itself is unchanged; the 2213 refusal and the later 2294 certification establish that every step down has to be earned in the open. Rates track demonstrated institutional need: the architecture carries a long-run downward expectation as functions retire, but no reduction occurs unless every required finding passes. The lesson of the record remains: rates fall when shown, and hold when a required fact is not shown.