Where Does The Money Go? Okay, If You're So Smart: The Budget Spreadsheet

People used to say any American child could grow up to be president. Well, with our budget spreadsheet, that means you.

In the print edition of Where Does the Money Go? we included a worksheet so that readers could figure out for themselves what it takes to make the federal government's books balance. This is the same worksheet, essentially an annotated version of the 2009 federal budget in Excel spreadsheet format, so you can download it and play with the numbers yourself.

The goal of the exercise is see what it takes to balance the federal budget in a given year. We’ve given you a list of programs and revenue sources. You can increase, decrease, or eliminate any item you want, but you are limited to those “discretionary” programs that can vary from year to year. There are, as we’ve discussed, a lot of things that could be done with programs like Medicare and Social Security, but very few of them pay off right away, so they don’t affect a one-year budget. A few things are off limits. You can’t cut interest payments on the debt, for example. The banks have to get their money.

In the real world, there are political and economic consequences to any of these decisions. We’ve pointed some of them out in the worksheet. You can factor them into your decisions, or not, as you please. But you should realize that the real president and Congress are going to be weighing these consequences, whether you do or not.

If you want to play around with changing the long-term fiscal trends, which is even more important than the annual budget, there are several good online simulations. The New York Times "Budget Puzzle" is a good one that lets you try to close the budget gap for 2015 and 2030. Another calculator, from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, takes a different approach. Stabilize the Debt is designed to hold the national debt at 60 percent of the total U.S. economy (also known as gross domestic product or GDP). A number of budget organizations have called for setting a budget target like this, although some argue 60 percent is too low. It's another way of approaching the problem, but no easier when it comes to making the choices.