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Online Budgeting

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Interesting.

French Budget Minister Jean-Francois Cope has announced the launch of an online game for the country’s taxpayers to have a go at balancing the books.

The game, called Cyberbudget, will launch in May and will let users manage 300bn euros ($373bn).

Some 10,000 players will be able to play at any one time for up to an hour, media reports say.

“The idea is that when we cut taxes, we can’t do it without creating deficits,” Mr Cope told French television.

Any game that could explain to people how $373 billion still can’t pay for everything we want would no doubt be socially valuable. I wonder to what extent the game will capture the difficulty of budgeting around entrenched interests and lobbies. It’s this last that really sets apart most computer games from reality; any successful game of Civilization or Sim City usually means enduring several fiscal crises, but the player almost always has near dictatorial fiscal power.

In the United States, the problem with a game like this is that a substantial portion of the players remain convinced that there are, in fact, no trade-offs required. Lower taxes, they believe, invariably lead to higher revenues, no deficits, and free ponies for all. It’s hard to have a serious budgetary discussion when one side is fundamentally unserious.

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