As a follow-up to my earlier post on using the NYT game to balance the budget, I thought I’d round up what others in the blogosphere were doing.
Reuter columnist Felix Salmon elects a balance of 69% tax increases and 31% spending cuts, cuts mostly coming from the defense budget and by eliminating government contractors.
Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture has a balance of 39% tax increase and 61% spending cuts. He doesn’t give his detailed choices.
Arnold Kling goes for cutting entitlements and no tax increases. His colleague, David Henderson, makes similar choices but also cuts military spending.
My colleague at OTB, Doug Mataconis, makes most of the spending cuts and increases taxes on the highest income earners.
Professor Stephen Bainbridge makes choices similar to mine but is more favorably disposed to an immediate reduction in the number of federal employees and a reduction in aid to the states than I am.
Steve Hynd of Newshoggers prefers 62% tax increases with 38% spending cuts, mostly from the military budget.
Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns, and Money balances the budget by cutting military spending, means-testing Social Security (!), and raising taxes.
I’ll add others as I find them. The one conclusion I’d draw at this point is that there’s no simple consensus for anything revealed by the responses which pretty much tells you how we got to the point at which we find ourselves.
Update
Reuters columnist James Pethokoukis balanced the budget entirely via spending cuts.
Derek Thompson employed a 50/50 balance of spending cuts (varied) and tax increases. He summarizes his actual preferences:
My dream budget would be more wacky than the Times feature allows. For example, I would use a carbon tax to partially reduce corporate income rates and I would use a national sales tax (a value-added tax) to partially reduce payroll tax rates on employers. This would, ideally, move our tax code away from taxing income and employment toward incentivizing green energy and savings.
OTB colleague Steve Verdon weighs in with a package of spending cuts and, somewhat to my surprise, tax increases. It’s a pretty temperate, reasonable approach to the extent that’s possible within the confines of the game.
I’m 65% spending cuts; 35% tax increases. I cut a little everywhere, including the more modest option for pullback from Afghanistan. But by clicking cut Medicare growth, I achieved almost 42% elimination of the long term debt. Pretty easy. And since it’s growth at GDP plus 1%, it’s not as if we’re giving up anything we currently enjoy, right?
Again, the story is the interest, the buzz.
The “meta” on the tool is more important than the tool.
Keep it up, “attention” is a prerequisite for “solution.”
I wish the tool created a pie chart for quick, easy comparisons.
I wish we knew how many people, other than writers, are capable of working until 70.
Steve
Here’s my comment on this from Ambiance:I came up with $592 billion for 2015 and $1,490 billion in 2030. Not nearly enough to cover the real budget shortfalls that will happen, but I was limited by rather crappy choices on the tax side. Almost all of the proposals on the tax front are very conventional. Which is to say it merely perpetuates the current system which allows the politicians and lobbiests to completely suck dry of the rest of the country. I refuse to reward the pols by playing their game even in a useless excercise such as this. Anything with a “tax break†or “tax credit†is just another chance for the politicians to fuck the rest of us by manipulating the system. The lobbiests love this system for the same reason.
We need a tax system that an idiot could understand. You know, people like our current Secretary of the Treasury or the recent Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives!
Some of the spending cuts weren’t well definied. Raising the Medicare eligibility age to 70 would be good if it were phased in. The devil’s in the details though, so I left about $50 billion on the table for that.
Currently I’m at 66% savings from spending cuts and 34% from tax increases.
It’s still not enough….steve, my mother worked until she was 73. It was clerical work, the same as she had done all her life.
PD, I got my to my spending cuts without cutting the Medicare growth rate. Unless someone tells me HOW they will do it I am assuming it’s more BS such as was pulled in the late 1990s or in the recent healthcare reform package.
JP, there’s not going to be a solution until we’re “at the point of dying”, to quote a favorite old Western. Every program is someone’s Third Rail.
Sorry, the blockquotes didn’t take. Everything from the first semi-colon to my comments to steve, PD and JP was posted elsewhere first.