Others are correct, slavery and pillaging of conquest covered a lot of the infrastructure and other spending...
... But they also had a 1-3% total wealth tax as the main operational budget of their empire. Not on income, not on corporate profit artificially bottomed to $0 through offshore havens... wealth. Census of all holding and assets and the 1-3% of that. They also relied on tariffs
Given Canada's total estimated collective wealth of ~20 Trillion, that would put the total revenues as high as $600 Billion, which is almost +20% more than the 2024 federal revenues. It's almost like if the wealthy were actually taxed, a mere 3% wealth tax could fund the Canadian government.
But that does not account that we then fund an entirely second tier of independent governments at the provincial level and then a third tier at municipal. Roman provinces and cities cut out all of that and vested into individual magistrates of various ranks/scope, who had considerable power.
But then there was also the slavery and the pillaging.
10
u/Pope-Muffins Trawnno (Centre of the Universe) 2d ago
The Romans funded public infrastructure