Addison video game company says, “No taxation without information!”

by Jake Kemp

ADDISON — In the last year, people have gotten used to talks about bailouts and stimulus packages with seemingly cartoon-like numbers attached to them. All of this spending coupled with the persistence of economic turmoil and uncertainty has left a great number of Americans asking the same question: Where is all of our money going? It took an Addison company that designs and develops video games to come up with an easy, accessible way for people to get an answer.

“I was stuck in traffic one day listening to two people talk about fiscal policy on the radio, and thought, 'you know, this stuff is really difficult to find out about,'” said Robert Westmoreland, president of Method Solutions. And just like that, on a congested Dallas-Fort Worth freeway, the idea for balancethebudget.com was born. The website maps out where every dollar in the federal budget comes from, as well as where it goes. All of the data used on the site is readily available through the Congressional Budget Office -- though most people probably wouldn't consider 500 page PDF files “readily” anything other than confusing.

Victoria Banks, vice president of operations for balancethebudget.com, says accessibility and interactivity were top of mind during the design and development phase. “Our hope is that people can use the site to learn and figure out a bit about where their money is going, and it will spur them on to take action by contacting their representatives or getting more involved with local government,” she said.

The site is painstakingly in-depth, and the wealth of detailed information makes it seem more like it was created by tax lawyers than video game developers. (More about that later.) “That part wasn't that vexing, getting all the data in there, because the CBO will provide the data in spreadsheet format,” Westmoreland said. The spreadsheet was 95,000 lines long – and that's long – but because they can copy and paste the code, length wasn't an issue.

But the key feature to the site is its interactive nature, which Banks says is a direct result of their experience in the video game industry. “When you let people interact with it, it makes more of an impact,” she said. It takes a gamer's mindset to make something seemingly boring like balancing the federal budget seem engaging.

The site offers both a “simple” and a “detailed” option for those who wish to attempt to balance the budget. However, these should probably be renamed “migraine,” and “aneurysm,” respectively. It's not that the site is difficult to use -- in fact, it's remarkably simple.

Users start with two options: expenditures or revenues, based on what the government currently spends. Then, you pick an area to spend money on or to tax.

Let's say you'd like to start by making some changes to what the country spends on National Security and Foreign Affairs. You could just click and slide the bar that represents that category's budget one way or the other, evenly distributing the change in funding across everything that falls under that heading. Or, you could go more in-depth, and this is where the headaches start.

After selecting National Security and Foreign Affairs, say you whittle down your choices to balancing the budget of Administration of Foreign Affairs. Once there, you will get a brief description of what this department does, and you will learn that its activities account for $10.2 billion of the federal budget. A list of 18 categories is provided, all with the amount spent on each individual category. Each category is a confusing array of bureaucratic terms of which you can manually fund. For example, the Civilian Stabilization Initiative gets $27 million; the Office of the Inspector General get $59 million; and the Foreign Service Retirement and Disability Fund – didn't know that existed – gets a whopping $837 million.

So despite the incredibly user-friendly format of the site, it's hard not to come away initially a little perplexed with the fiscal issues the federal government has gotten itself into. “We've always wanted people to know it's not simple. Every decision on fiscal policy affects so many people. Every time you change something it has a real effect,” Banks said. “It's a very delicate line you walk between giving people the information and not making it so overwhelming that you can't accomplish your goals of helping people understand it.”

The taxation portion of the site is a little easier to understand for the economics layman, probably because it's personal: People are more familiar with how the government takes their money than how it spends it. Users have the chance to write their own version of the tax code, deciding how much every income bracket is taxed. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the site, and the one that Westmoreland says is his favorite, is the “user-created revenue” option. This is essentially a “line-item” feature that allows users to create their own new tax or expenditure and insert it into the budget. (Think of it this way: Users can create a “sin tax,” for instance, applied to those who over-use Botox. And the like.)

Banks said she would like people to have a sort of “aha” moment after using the site a few times, where things start to come together and make a little more sense. One of the most common “aha” moments users are sure to come away with is how horribly, seemingly hopelessly troubled the federal government is fiscally. Another might be a sense of frustration that a site like this was not created and provided by the government on its own: Why did it take an Addison-based video game company to give Americans this “virtual town hall,” a place where the minutia of budget-policy can be reviewed and understood by average people?

The site allows users to share their budgets with others, and forums and “guest blog” sections are in the works. Westmoreland, a man who has clearly lost faith in the government to exercise fiscal responsibility, thinks balancethebudget.com is a step in the right direction to someone stepping up with a solution. “I don't think that at any other job, these people would survive. They would be fired,” he said. “I'm of the belief that it will ultimately be the private sector that has to fix this problem. I don't think we can rely on the same people that got us into this mess to get us out.”