Balance the Federal Budget Online

Mightyware ^ | 2/28/2010 | Todd Bandrowsky

[tjbandrowsky]

What's often lost in the federal budget debate is that the amount of money consumed by the government also indicates the amount of time a citizen must devote his or her life to satisfy the government's want of money.

To help illustrate this point, I've posted an online application (no registration required), that lets you balance the federal budget. You can either cut items, or, simply do nothing and implicitly choose to work more hours a year to pay for it. It has all the line items to a fairly good level of detail, down to Pentagon details, entitlements distributions by age bracket (in the case of SSI), and estimated disease type (in the case of disability).

Check it out at:

http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs

[Question Liberal Authority]

Very cool!

I starved orphans and seniors and the budget was balanced in no time.

[greeneyes]

What???????? Why didn’t you start with the Czars, Congress, and the newly formed health council?

[Question Liberal Authority]

A lot of Congress is made up of Seniors, so if I starve them all, it kills two birds with one stone.

[Netizen]

Te government pays farmers to not grow crops. What part of agriculture would that fall into?

[PugetSoundSoldier]

Interesting... Cutting TARP results in an INCREASE in the budget. How does that work?

Healthcare fraud and abuse control is listed twice with two different amounts.

Same with two operation of recreational resources different values, and other fields.

And there’s no credit for reducing regulation, stimulating total GDP.

[greeneyes]

Yeh, but theres younger dudes and dudettes and I’d really like to see the Czars go first. After all some of the seniors are conservatives.

[Netizen]

Is there a way to reduce something without cutting it entirely?

[Question Liberal Authority]

Did you go to the link? There are several thousand line items there. Go ahead and run the numbers. Knock yourself out.The deficit is about 1,000 billion dollars, out of a total budget of about 3,300 billion dollars. You’re not going to get a balanced budget by cutting a few things along the edges.

[Question Liberal Authority]

Interesting... Cutting TARP results in an INCREASE in the budget. How does that work?

The money was spent in prior years and the money is being paid back now.

TARP was the Bush Administration thing. It was designed to be deficit neutral, and could possibly bring in more money than it originally cost. Whether it was a good idea in the first place is another debate.

TARP shouldn't be confused with Obama's Porkulus bill, which is pretty much just massive fraud.

[ChiefJayStrongbow]

extremely cool ... if Congress wasn’t granted the power to spend it in the constitution, I cut it.

$1,963 billion and work -,149 hours more year.

[greeneyes]

I didn’t say cut ONLY Czar’s and Congresscritters, I said START with them, or are you in love with the Czars??????

Anyway it was actually a satirical joke. Jeeeeeeeeez. Take a chill pill.

[Question Liberal Authority]

Anyway it was actually a satirical joke.

So was balancing the budget by "starving orphans and seniors".

[greeneyes]

Well I thought you were making a joke until you freakin jumped on me with did you go to the site etc.

[gattaca]

LOL, too funny!!!

[jimjohn2458]

very cool!

I did I quick review and got it down to $362 billion and work 76 hours more year. granted, I was just getting started. there are thousands of things I could say. But who is the author of this program? I have some ideas that could make this webpage WILDY popular.

[familyop]

I kept the military and a little welfare going while cutting over $800 billion from the incomes of government-employed family-haters and assorted other pathological thieves. Then I thought, “Hmmm. Why not just encourage them to keep spending more, until the big default eliminates big government waste?”

[EBH]

Ok...I must be eligible to work for the current government...

How does one make the program run?

I am clicking on stuff and nothing happens?

[tjbandrowsky]

you need to have javascript enabled and also the latest browser - Firefox, Google Chrome. Sorry for the rough ride.

[tjbandrowsky]

What they did with TARP is that last year they paid it all out. This year the TARP is a credit as it represents what the banks have paid back.

I’ll look at the healthcare fraud and abuse control - its possible that there are separate programs for it - or separate line items for on and off budget expenses. I’m using the basis is a CSV supplied by the CBO.

As far as the impact of reducing regulation, its outside of the scope of this story, but, I’m actually going to look at the effects of that and also policies regarding taxation on things like energy in a more complicated simulation that is coming. In that, you’ll see various demographics and get to play some policy what if. It turns out really that raising taxes (or regulating) on one thing has spillover effects in that some people just eat the higher price and cut elsewhere, particularly, loan repayments.