[741] in libertarians
Ok, YOU Balance the Budget!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vernon Imrich)
Thu Feb 23 20:02:36 1995
To: libertarians-announce@MIT.EDU
Cc: objectivism@MIT.EDU, politics@MIT.EDU, safe@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: vimrich@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 19:57:42 EST
From: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>
Tired of timid politicians?
Want to balance the federal budget yourself?
All you need is now available FREE at MIT thanks to the
**** MIT Libertarians ****
(and me)
BUDGET BLASTER!
This is nothing more than a set of two linked spreadsheets, the
current or baseline projected budget figures from 1995 - 2002, and a
worksheet for YOUR budget. The figures come from the CBO via
a recent _US News & World Report_ Article (which indicated that
readers should make the information accessible wherever possible).
If you know how to enter numbers on a spreadsheet you need no
more help. Just type the following command:
add libertarians; blaster&
from any athena terminal which supports the Xess spreadsheet program.
If you've never used a spreadsheet before, why not learn with this?
Xess is very easy to learn, an has lots of on screen help. This command
will copy both spreadsheets into your home directory and bring up your
worksheet.
THIS IS THE FIRST VERSION. I'm pretty sure it's bug free, but
you know how that is. Send bug reports to: vimrich@mit.edu
YOU HAVE SEVEN YEARS:
The goal is to balance the federal budget by 2002. To do so, you
must meet (or exceed) budget deficit targets from 1996 onward (1995
is provided for reference only, do not change the 1995 budget). This
may be done by either cutting spending or raising taxes. You may
NOT cut debt interest payments, but you will get an automatic
interest credit for meeting the yearly targets. You are free to cut
anything else, military, entitlements, education, and even Social
Security. It's up to you. If you want, you can try to cut taxes
and raise spending at the same time. Better pay for it though!
To continue to the next year, however, you must meet the target
deficit first. If not, you will see an error "constraint violation"
(a blackened entry) at the bottom of column of the year you
are currently working on. When the budget targets are met for
each year, the entry should become normal. When the constraint
violations for all seven years have vanished, the deficit will be
reduced to zero by 2002.
YOU'VE BALANCED THE BUDGET!
Of course, it's not like you can just chop out or raise anything
without angering people. Everyone is going to want to know, "who
did you hurt?" For these purposes, there is a host of diagnostic
information to the right of the main budget figures columns.
Here you can read out how much you budgeted for the various program
types (for the disadvantaged, scientific research, environment,
etc.). Further to the right, you can see how much you cut/raised
each program as a percentage of the baseline (i.e. current) outlays.
WILL THE INTEREST GROUPS STAND FOR WHAT YOU DID?
It's not a scientific question, but you'll have the data to
make a guess. Your plan isn't much good if no one will buy
it. If you find it easy to balance the budget (as I'd guess
most of my fellow libertarians would) then try coming up
with a plan that you think could really pass. Can you do it
with tax cuts, tax freezes? Who will take the spending cuts?
Those of you who've used Xess before know how easy it is to make
pie graphs or histograms of this kind of data. These diagnostic
columns are located so that pie graphs can be easily made showing
your total budget outlays, your discretionary budget outlays,
and your tax revenue distribution. Sample pie charts of this
type are included in the reference or baseline sheet (the one
Xess uses to calculate how big your cuts are). You can view
these samples by simply using "open" in the "file" menu to
open the "Budget.xs3" sheet. But be careful NOT to change this
baseline sheet or your diagnostics will be erroneous.
Note: if you don't want to try it all in one session, be sure to
save your altered spreadsheets. DO NOT USE THE BLASTER COMMAND
ABOVE TO RESTART WITH AN OLD SHEET!! It will attempt to copy
the starter sheets and may copy them right over your current sheets.
To restart an old sheet, just grab "xess" out of the "Numerical/Math"
part of the athena Dash and use the "open" command to open up your
old sheets.
This is an evolving resource. Please let me know what you think of it.
Perhaps we can get together in "focus groups" and try to come up
with the "optimal" budget. Or, we could have "dream" budgets with
only the outlays we'd like to see if we were king.
If you think you've got a good worksheet, put it in your Public
directory so others can see it. We may put a collection of
typical sheets in the libertarians locker.
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| Vernon Imrich | market failure, n. The inabilty of the |
| MIT, Dept. OE | market to recover from a blow by |
| Cambridge, MA 02139 | intervention. (The Exchange) |
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| MIT LP: http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/libertarians/home.html |
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