Budget Hero

Marketplace has a very cool "game"- Budget Hero, where you get to play with widgets and control the US government's budget. Yeah, and I thought doing my own budget was difficult enough...

The deal is you choose three "badges", which are widgets that represent certain issues. So I played twice, and sadly I busted the US budget both times, by the year 2033. The first time I chose Competitive Advantage, Green, and Energy Independence. Depressed I busted the budget and labeled Debt Maintainer (I quote; "You made no impact on the 2008 debt level, maintaining it at 37.7% of GDP in 2018, 8.4 trillion"), I switched out Energy Independence (why who doesn't love giving the Saudis money) for Efficient Government. And I still got the same result.

The fascinating part is the breakdown. If you slide the curser around the buildings, the cost of each item breaks down, ie interest on debt 422 billion. Clicking on the taxes brought up a lot of very large numbers, Repeal the Bush tax cuts +2,725 billion, then you click on that box and it tells you that this 2.725 trillion buck windfall is over 10 years, and it has blurbs on the pros and cons of doing so, and the impact. Anyways, I just sucked a good hour of my life on this game, so enjoy.