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Nov 11 2009, 11:30 am

Could You Balance the Federal Budget?

I write a lot about the intractability of military and entitlement spending and the need to raise taxes to pay down the deficit. This would seem to be an opportunity to walk the walk on the budget talk.

The Budget Challenge game at FederalBudgetChallenge.org puts next year's budget in your hands and tallies the budget implications of your chosen policies. More helpfully, the folks at FBC include a sidebar that explains some of the consequences of each measure. Obviously the game isn't an all-inclusive menu of spending and tax options -- and balancing the federal deficit during the rump of a recession is a long-term project rather than a check-off list for a single fiscal year -- but it's an interesting game, nonetheless.

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Comments (4)

Could I balance the Federal budget? Sure. Budgets are easy to balance. How much you got? That's how much you can spend.

Could I balance it with the spending imperatives of the current government? No. They want to spend more than they got. Can't be done. Might as well ask a different question.

Incidentally, I ran it selecting every single deficit reduction possibility and still came up with a very large deficit. This may be somebody's idea of a joke.

Thorley Winston


Agreed it is a joke. I used to run this same simulator back in college and back then the Concord Coalition put out a much more comprehensive version where you could increase or decrease pretty much every area of the federal budget and revenue source by a fixed percentage.

This one was a lot more restrictive and limited you to a couple of policy choices for a few areas of the federal budget. Example: for Medicare and Social Security, you don’t have the option of means-testing either program or phasing in a higher eligibility age for Medicare.


Todd Loren Sinclair

Yes I could. 95% would come from permanent military spending cuts which accounts for 54% of federal spending. http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Federal%20Discretionary%20and%20Mandatory%20Spending

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