Congratulations! You’re Governor. Now Balance the Budget.

The Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute and the University of Baltimore School of Information Arts and Technologies have a challenge for you.

You’ve just been elected Governor of the State of Maryland, and you have a constitutional responsibility to balance the budget. As it turns out, you’re facing a $1.7 billion deficit.

What do you do?

What do you do?

The Maryland Budget Game allows you to allocate resources to critical budget areas ranging from transportation to education, but this game goes beyond the balance sheet and considers politics as well:

You need to pay attention to this year’s budget balance. Making the “current year balance” a positive number is what you are required to do under the constitution.

You should also pay attention to the long-term balance. This adjusts for all sorts of one-time actions (like transferring funds from reserves or temporary employee furloughs) that affect this year’s budget, but not the underlying sources of ongoing income and ongoing expenditure needs. If you can get the long-term balance to be a positive number, you’ll put the state’s finances on a sustainable path for the future.

Each choice you make will not only affect the budget totals, it will also affect your popularity with ten different interest groups. If you make too many of these groups too unhappy, it might affect your and your party’s political future badly. The interest groups will appear from time to time all by themselves. If you want to visit them, you can go to the click the icon on the main map.

Congratulations, and good luck.

One Comment

1. I have no problem even if a state runs into a deficit now-and-then to promote the local economy or when the economy goes down. In either case, the state will have to work through, and overcome it.

   I have a problem when a state seem to have new “programs” for things the individual should take care of on his own, or that a family should do to chip in to help out each other.

   Comment by BabaSai - January 27, 2010 @ 4:33 am