Where can I find resources for using Fiscal Ship in the classroom?
Visit teach.fiscalship.org for lesson plans and resources for teachers.
Visit teach.fiscalship.org for lesson plans and resources for teachers.
We define fiscal sustainability as lowering the ratio of the federal debt held by the public to the gross domestic product in 2042 from a projected 126% to 75%, roughly where it is today. Although there is no consensus on just how much debt is “sustainable,” experts generally agree that the current trajectory of ever-rising debt is economically risky. To be sure, some economists and some politicians argue that reducing the debt/GDP ratio to 75% over the next 25 years is not enough.
We built our 25-year baseline from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections for revenues, outlays and deficits assuming current law. We construct our baseline—that is, a projection for the debt assuming no changes in tax or spending laws—by beginning with the most recent CBO 10-year estimates, and then extending each component of the budget those at the growth rates assumed in the most recent longer-term CBO outlook.
Policy options in the Fiscal Ship come from a wide range of sources: CBO’s Options for Reducing the Deficit, proposed legislation in congress, presidential budgets, other think tanks, and government agencies. Wherever possible, we begin with cost estimates from CBO, the Office of Management and Budget, the Social Security Administration, or the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. These estimates typically cover 5 to 10 years. We extend them to 25 years. Hutchins Center staff developed cost estimates for policies not scored by these organizations. All estimates are approximate.
The Hutchins Center staff, with input from our advisory committee, chose the options. We aim to include policies most discussed by budget experts and policy wonks and those most frequently mentioned by presidential candidates or policymakers. We do not pretend this is a comprehensive list; rather, we want to offer a wide range of options to both reduce and increase spending from projected levels and to raise and cut taxes.
Governing goals represent the player’s priorities for government. While there are many other issues or values that may be important to players, we chose ten to represent a variety of common values:
For each goal, we selected from the policy options in the game those that we judged would take the country closer to or further from the goal, weighting them to reflect the fact that different policies affect the goals to varying degrees.
Among the possible combinations of governing goals, most have at least one winning set of policies. However, a small number of combinations exist that make earning three stars for each goal and lowering projected debt to today’s level essentially impossible. Many of these combinations include the Tax Cutter goal for one simple reason: the more you decrease revenue, the harder it is to decrease the debt. Doing so requires you to decrease spending even more to make up for losses in revenue. In the real world, you might be able to find or create policies that could make it possible to reach all the goals and reduce the debt, but in the game we limited the policy options to those most discussed by budget experts and policy wonks and those most frequently mentioned by presidential candidates.
dynamic scoring is very difficult to do well, and impossible to do for all but the biggest changes in policy. The CBO and Joint Tax Committee of Congress are now required to estimate these effects, but only on very large pieces of legislation, such as immigration reform. Creating a dynamic score for each of the 100-plus policies in the game would be an immense challenge and likely produce bad estimates.
We identified a number of tax and spending policies that are similar to those supported by Donald Trump. Choosing one of these policies gives you points towards achieving Donald Trump’s priorities, and towards other governing goals that the policy impacts. The policies in the game may not precisely reflect those advocated by Trump during the campaign or from the White House. Moreover the game does not include all the policies that the president has endorsed. But we believe they properly reflect the scope of the President’s interests and the legislations he has pushed forward since the beginning of his campaign.
The Hutchins Center at Brookings and the Woodrow Wilson Center, both non-partisan and independent non-profit institutions, created The Fiscal Ship and are solely responsible for its content. We solicited advice from an advisory committee that represents a broad spectrum of political views. The game itself was built by 1st Playable Productions of Troy, N.Y.
We are grateful to our funders – the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Lounsbery Foundation. They exercised no editorial control over the game, and neither approve or disapprove of the content or the choices we made.
Yes. The game is playable on phones, tablets, and desktops.
The Fiscal Ship tracks limited personal and gameplay data while you play the game. We do this in order to improve the game, and to aggregate and share with the public the kinds of choices players make during the game.
For more details please view our Privacy Policy.