|
Well to start off, this game only lets you play with the assumptions the creators made... so there are more things that could be cut or spent on than are represented here... but it does have a nice cross-section to give you a feel for general themes.
With a mostly leftist agenda (and slightly libertarian although no libertarians would agree with it), I got it down to 57% of GDP.
I generally increased benefits to the poor/workers, left low/middle class tax cuts, raised taxes on rich (because I believe that is the best way to overall get the budget back on track), and slashed military expenditures mostly in the form of stopping pointless wars or what I consider bloat programs.
Also being anti-subsidy in general helps, as well as anti-pork.
I do think cuts in social security and medicare are needed in the long term (though I managed to get that balance without doing so), however I think you do that by intelligently reducing costs and wheening us away from the entitlement programs, not by slaughtering lots of old or nearly old people in the name of cost reduction while increasing the taxes on the young.
I do think its possible to slash a lot of debt from the budget and still be a bleeding heart. You just need to be viciously efficient with what you do choose to spend on (i.e. only spend to prevent human misery, do not spend to pork up some businesses who loosely claim they have some value... anything worth a profit doesn't need government support, it just needs an absence of government interference).
If we got out of the political pony show, which has lost all touch with reality anyway, and started attacking this budget, I think you could run a publicly popular campaign of budget fixing. To succeed from a populist perspective, you need to quit handing out money you don't need to, cut spending, cut lower bracket taxes, and raise higher bracket taxes. Spending is already being squeezed for stupid reasons across the board, just scream 'economic crisis' and governments start going into a slashing frenzy. Might as well do planned slashing and get things under control.
Things not shown in this simulator that could help:
- Slash earmarks even more fiercely.
- Complete withdrawl from Iraq/Afghanistan
- Military spending reform (make the bidding more competitive and better match spending to real military utility, i.e. less superplanes with 3% better performance and more life-saving body armor for each troop in the field).
- Raise capital gains/dividends taxes, we are in a 'recovery' that is mostly finance-driven (i.e. useless). If we had another 5-10% it could make a difference for all those big rich guys who bought up a lot of stock when it was cheap over a year ago.
- Slash subsidies even more fiercely.
- Cut any pork that goes to a specific corporation (or such narrowly defined criteria that it targets a specific corporation)
- Require streamlined education administration nation-wide, reduce overhead expenses relative to spending on direct to student supplies by a set percentage each year until the numbers make sense again.
- Tighten 'descretionary spending' (really a very broad category and a huge chunk of money).
- Stop the stupid bailouts.
- Exercise these massive shares in banks and GM and reform their boards/execs from the inside.
- Cut a lot of federal jobs and contracts (and state level to while we are at it).
- Make multiple agencies funded by fines/taxes on the companies they regulate, and encourage vicious enforcement. For instance MMS actually fining BP every day they didn't meet blowout preventer testing requirements.
- Slash deductions and credits along with the lower and mid bracket rates... don't take the money from people in the first place, and make it less complicated on what they can get back from the government after the fact.
- Aggressive environmental taxation, basically carbon cap trade with some actual teeth to it. Make it a real business to operate cleanly, not just a pony show... kill off companies that can't make a reasonable spec for pollution profile.
- Reduce paperwork bureaucracies for running a business, particularly small businesses. If this means simplified tax code, less busywork, and maybe a little less revenue from fees/fines and dumb costs, it will be made up on the overhead for processing all that garbage being reduced, and doubled by businesses able to spend that money on more useful needs than government compliance.
- Create employer tax credits directly linked to employment expenditures, capped to middle class salary levels. The numbers on this can be gamed to allow for a net increase in revenue in theory (or even easier if you can reliably tie it to 'new employment' although I like the idea of just rewarding employment in general and letting the numbers converge to a positive over the long term). This is a subsidy of course, but it is a pretty clear incentive mechanism and it counterweights itself from increased individual tax revenue. Much more effective than the supply side pork spending we do now in a vague attempt to create jobs (guess what, they pocket most of the pork!).
|