“Budget Hero” – Public Media’s Most Despicable Financial Propaganda is the title of a great anti-austerity piece by William K. Black on the New Economic Perspectives site. It appears that some very strange and economically ignorant people have designed an on-line game to demonstrate their destructive view of how the economy works.
Bill Black is an expert on regulatory policy and fraud prevention and is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.
The ‘Budget Hero’ game is basically rigged to show that only major public expenditure cuts can avoid budget blow-up, irrespective of what the real impacts of those cuts might be. As Black points out, this rules out the sort of negative impacts of austerity we have seen in the UK and Europe. It’s evidently not even possible to adopt a policy of offsetting tax increases.
As I have pointed out before, and this confirms, only dishonesty can defend this type of policy.