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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.)