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You can do something similar in a much easier manner with the committee for a responsible federal budget’s debt fixer site: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/ htt

You can do something similar in a much easier manner with the committee for a responsible federal budget’s debt fixer site: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/ https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/ It’s not quite up to date with the latest budget numbers, but still a good way to see the hard choices that need to be made.

mchusma 6y ago
I thought it was an interesting tool, thanks for sharing. But it's very opinionated in often bizarre ways, where it required choices all of which seemed bad and often all choices would increase the debt. For example, it asked which free college choice should we offer, there was no "none" let alone a "reduce government loan subsidies" option. So I stopped partway as this seemed more like a tool trying to push a specific policy agenda (maybe good or bad, depending on your perspective) than actually balance the budget. I'm also not very sure a bunch of small changes can really work. It's likely big dramatic changes are necessary. For example: - replace all social welfare programs with basic income that we can afford. - replace all healthcare with a universal healthcare system that focuses on free human-less diagnostics and generic drugs and otherwise a free market. (It would be very cheap to offer this and it would be dramatically better for most). - cut military budget by 50%, but let the military itself determine how to cut. I was in the Army. There is easily 50% of waste there, but it is everywhere and you would need to implement a culture of budget awareness (e.g. don't start your tank to heat a can of soup). - reduce prison population 90% of it's current level. Once or twice a year, just order prisoners from "most releasable" to "least releasable", and release anyone over a threshold. You might disagree with these implementations, and that is fine, but somehow it feels large changes like this are dramatically more likely than killing a million small programs without them coming back.

mchusma 6y ago

I thought it was an interesting tool, thanks for sharing. But it's very opinionated in often bizarre ways, where it required choices all of which seemed bad and often all choices would increase the debt. For example, it asked which free college choice should we offer, there was no "none" let alone a "reduce government loan subsidies" option. So I stopped partway as this seemed more like a tool trying to push a specific policy agenda (maybe good or bad, depending on your perspective) than actually balance the budget. I'm also not very sure a bunch of small changes can really work. It's likely big dramatic changes are necessary. For example: - replace all social welfare programs with basic income that we can afford. - replace all healthcare with a universal healthcare system that focuses on free human-less diagnostics and generic drugs and otherwise a free market. (It would be very cheap to offer this and it would be dramatically better for most). - cut military budget by 50%, but let the military itself determine how to cut. I was in the Army. There is easily 50% of waste there, but it is everywhere and you would need to implement a culture of budget awareness (e.g. don't start your tank to heat a can of soup). - reduce prison population 90% of it's current level. Once or twice a year, just order prisoners from "most releasable" to "least releasable", and release anyone over a threshold. You might disagree with these implementations, and that is fine, but somehow it feels large changes like this are dramatically more likely than killing a million small programs without them coming back.