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A post from last year that came up in my daily archive caught my attention with its title, A Budgetary Hat-Trick, I had a look to remind myself and rediscovered Budget Hero. When I played last year the budget was projected to go bust in 2033 barring any changes and I managed to balance the budget, increase security, achieve energy independence, and eliminate government waste at the same time so that the budget bust date was pushed back to sometime after 2070. When I looked this year I saw that the game had been updated after the stimulus and bailouts of the past year. The budget is now scheduled to go bust in 2028 without changes. That made me curious about whether I could still balance the budget. Remembering that all of this is completely dependent on the assumptions built into the game, here are the results I got.
I was able to balance the budget and run huge surpluses within 9 years by cutting virtually everything I could think of and jacking up the taxes on everything under the sun. Being a bit more reasonable I was able, like last year, to push the budget bust date into the indefinite future and achieve the goals of increasing national security, cutting government waste, and becoming energy independent.
Besides changing the starting numbers for the federal government fiscal situation the game was also updated to include new priorities to pursue (at least my memory tells me that “Health and Wellness” and “Economic Stimulus” are new since last year). I decided to see if it was even possible to increase national security, reduce government waste, and promote health and wellness simultaneously. It took more work than achieving energy independence and it was absolutely necessary to pass the Cap and Tax to get it done, but I was able achieve these goals.
It should be noted that I only achieved a very modest reduction in the deficit with these goals and I barely managed to earn the “Efficient Government” badge when trying to also get “Health and Wellness” but I did figure it out. I am absolutely confident that if the game were to allow players to choose 4 goals rather than 3 it would be impossible to get “Health and Wellness” and “Energy Independence” while still increasing national security and making government more efficient – something would have to give. (There are other sets of four badges that could probably be accomplished simultaneously.)
7 replies on “Budget Hero Revisited”
You can do it, but our politicians can’t, because politics works a lot like the poster at this link: http://despair.com/meetings.html .
A bit oversimplified and missing a few options but more or less not bad.
I maintain that I can only do it within the accuracy limits of the game, which I am not qualified to vouch for. I think Ron hit it on the head – not perfect, but it’s good enough to get you thinking or start a conversation. I wonder if it would do any good if our political leaders were required to play the game and post their results publicly.
I like the link you provided Reach, I also like to the equation for calculating the intelligence of a group from Terry Prachett (I believe it’s in his book “Thud!”) – the IQ of a group is equal to the IQ of it’s dumbest member divided by the number of group members. (No matter how smart the smartest senator is that does not amount to much once it’s divided by 100.)
I loved the Disc World Video games lol, Shame Terry Prachett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer.
Its a real shame they didn’t include the fair tax proposal in that game, income tax increases based on a percent, its missing a single payer/NHS option in the healthcare options, its also missing an increase promotion of CDHP(consumer driven health plans) option, removing tax benefit caps on HSA’s etc.
I guess figuring out the benefits/dis-benefits for these would be real hard, and far to easily biased on what their effects would be.
I think you are right about the difficulty in deciding on the benefits/drawbacks for some of those ideas in an unbiased way, and not very valuable to the game when the ideas are budget neutral (such as the fair tax is promoted to be).
I actually have some rather different idea’s on tax’s, The way I would implement a fair tax proposal would make it such that it would be a continually neutral tax and not just neutral for the current budget level.
Basically I start with Mike Huckabee’s tax plan, 23% consumption tax that replaces the income tax and prebate all American’s up to the poverty line. I would also allow parents to receive half the prebate amount for each dependent up to the age of 18 years. Social Security, and Medicare would remain as payroll deduction tax’s.
From their I would have a 6 member panel created 3 appointed by congress and 3 appointed by the president which would be charged with changing the rate of the tax annually based on the budget requirements. In the event that their is a tie vote by the panel the VP can cast a vote and he can be overridden by a 2/3rds vote of ether house of congress. This panel could Also be sued to force rate changes if they are not collecting enough. The rate of this tax would be required by law to cover all costs of the government and debt under the terms for which that debt was issued.
Next I would Make it completely Illegal for the executive Branch to Issue any debt without approval of both Houses of Congress.
Next I would Make it Illegal for any other Item then the Issuance of debt to be in a Issuance of debt Bill. The Issuance of Debt Absolutely must stand on it’s own. And I would make it law that all Issuance of debt bills Titles be in all caps bold large fonts And the Color Red so that no one can miss it.
This would go much further to help with the problem of spending, No party can run up a huge debt and leave it on the next congress to fix and then take the blame for having to raise tax’s. Spending would immediately effect everyone and can’t be hidden inside of debt easily, I can just image Congress trying to pass the “Massive debt Issuance act of 2010” a one line bill instructing the Fed to issue 2trillion in bonds to be placed in the general fund.
But this would take a constitutional amendment so is rather pie in the skyish.
Those are some interesting ideas, but as you say, very pie-in-the-skyish. On the other hand, I really like the caricature that I can envision of Congress passing the “Massive debt Issuance act of 2010.?