The Deficit Made Me Do It!

I've been playing a game called Democracy. Its premise is that you've just been elected President; you can pass laws, revoke laws, adjust taxes, and so forth. (Yeah, I know, the President doesn't automatically have the power to do all that. But if you couldn't do these things, there wouldn't be much of a game.)

So you can basically reshape the country's laws into whatever you think would work best; and see then how that works out. It's like a political version of Sim City.

There are two conditions. First of all, obviously, voters may not approve of your changes; and if you're voted out of office, no matter how well things are going, you lose. Secondly, you have the national debt to worry about.

The national debt is by far the harder problem to cope with. You can win people's votes pretty easily, by setting up federal programs that are targeted to their interests; the game's structure is set up to make this pretty clear and easy.

But almost every good idea seems to be expensive! And raising taxes will kill you, politically. And there's already a mountain of national debt to work your way out of. Trying to reduce the national debt changes you from a confident social reformer to a hag-ridden penny-pincher who ends every policy discussion with "We can't afford that."

Into this desperate situation comes a thought: the Flag-Burning Amendment doesn't cost anything. It boosts my popularity with certain groups in a cheap and easy way, so that I can either cut these programs or raise those taxes, which normally would send them into a fury and guarantee my loss next election...

That's just an example. There are lots of free, horrible-idea programs whose only purpose is to please some interest group. And I would never have considered them under normal circumstances. But the fascination of the game is how its logic forces you to consider passing them; not because you like them, but just because it gets you some breathing space to get the real job done.

I don't know if that's even passingly comparable to real-life politics. But it wouldn't surprise me at all.