(Not sure this is a GD topic but it underlies many debates, so…)
During the election cycle I encountered a couple of examples of “build your own budget” calculators that had blocks for revenue on one side and blocks for spending on the other, and you could push them in and out to reach as balanced or unbalanced a town, city, state or national budget as you liked.
I don’t know if there is any organization or site that maintains one of these - for the US, for each state, etc. - but it seems like a worthy goal for one of the think-tanks or fact-checking orgs to undertake. Keep it updated with realistic revenue predictions, real and proposed spending blocks, etc.
Then anyone can go there and push the numbers around all they like - and find out things like the “massive entitlement” they bitch about is 0.05% of the budget, and just how much goes to Social Security, the military, and other mega-blocks.
Does any such site exist, and if not, who do we petition to bring it into existence?
[ul]
[li]Balance the federal budget.[/li][li]Balance the North Carolina budget.[/li][/ul]
I can’t claim any accuracy or integrity of the data for these sites, although the latter has a NC govt web address. Both found with a simple Google search.
Budget Hero.
Budget Hero seems to me to be the best, but it has a clunky interface. The CRFB calculator forces some decisions together, giving it a lower resolution. (Budget Hero suffers from this as well but only in a couple places).
I haven’t seen any which let you adjust tax rates or spending directly. Some of the developers seem worried about limiting the number of assumptions they take. Others seem compelled to push a certain political side.
I am also agreed here to what you have said here. Any application which let you adjust tax rates or spending directly is not logically correct always. Developers too worried about limiting the number of assumptions they take. I haven’t used Budget Hero. But I would to like to use it now onwards.
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I’ve seen several of those calculators - I mean, games, but I’ve yet to see one that projects the economic impact of the decisions that are made. For example, the tax hikes and spending cuts are expected to significantly increase unemployment and probably cause another recession. As it is, the goal of the games I’ve seen is to figure out how to balance the budget, when in reality, the challenge is to balance the budget and not wreck the economy or throw old ladies out on the street.