Fun(?) with Budget simulation

Two weeks ago, I asked the students in my introductory American Government course to send me their decisions using this budget stabilization simulator.  I aggregated each individuals submissions and created a collective budget based on the total decisions of everyone.  Doing it this way offers no chance for coordinating activity like logrolling or deliberation, but it was not meant to pass an actual budget as much as to give a snapshot of policy preferences of students.

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://cowsandgraveyards.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/pols104_stabilize_the_debt_results21.pdfwp-content/uploads/2010/12/POLS104_stabilize_the_debt_results-1.pdf&embedded=true

I then asked them to try there hand last week, given the fact that the President has committed troops to Afghanistan at current levels and given the tax deal struck between the President and Congressional Republicans extends all of the Bush-era tax cuts. Here are the results from that exercise.

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://cowsandgraveyards.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/pols104_stabilize_the_debt_results21.pdf&embedded=true

Some observations:

• Five students the second time reported they could not bear to stabilize the debt the second time around.  They handed me budgets that did not meet their assigned targets and reported feeling that doing anything more seemed too draconian to endorse.
• Several students sent accompanying justifications that read more like apologies the second time.  Their confident policy priorities were left far worse off once getting out of Afghanistan and letting the Bush-era cuts expire were taken off the table.
• Both budgets are harsh on the elderly.  The second one enormously so.  I have received a strong sense from students that they are deeply resentful of the older generations in far greater numbers.  Many have expressed they would rather take their chances without an old-age safety net than continue with transfer payments that they perceive are robbing their youth to extend the old-age welfare of those older than they are.
• The second budget is draconian to the point of farce.  Funding cuts deep enough to reach the school lunch program, accompanied by every tax imaginable.
• In aggregating the budgets, I noticed that the ideological interests of students only took them so far.  ROTC students saved more of the budget for the military comparatively, but still made cuts and imposed extra costs on military life.  Conservatives voted for Cap and Trade. No one voted for an increased corporate tax break.  Liberals voted to make cuts to transportation and environmental projects and were likely to distribute the tax burden progressively, but not in a way that spared the lower classes at the expense of the upper class.
• The moral of the story for most students, as they reported it, is that budget choices are difficult and path dependent once one owns up to the problem of scarce resources.  Difficult in that one has to operate in constraints which will clearly upset others.  Path dependent in that certain choices open and foreclose other choices later.
• The moral of the story for me, though not scientific, was that students as choosers are not just capable of feeling the weight of their public choices, but they are easily capable of this.  That students would hand in deficits of 70% of GDP when the assignment was to get it t 60%, and say, “sorry, I just cannot do it,” when they are checking boxes in an extra credit assignment that effects no one in actuality (the students still got credit who did this, FYI) suggests that perhaps most of our polarization problems are problems of focused attention, and not, as popular theories on both the right and left seem to purport, because we are populated by disagreeable, sub-mental, conspirators out to destroy life as we know it.