YOU Balance The Budget

Nov 18th, 2010

Last week, the New York Times published a very interesting interactive page and a corresponding challenge. Providing a user interface with a series of choices drawn from the dominant proposals to balance the budget and reduce the deficit, it allowed the regular citizen to try their hand at what has become the BIG issue of the day.

What is notable is that we tried an experiment here. 10 users, myself included, tried 10 times to reach that magic solvency target. Out of 100 attempts, not one of us was successful without increasing taxes. It is simply not realistically possible. Try it yourself. 

For what it's worth, my preferred model is 72% tax increases and 28% spending cuts. Yes, I would have taxes raised on myself. That is because it is the only just approach.