After playing around with the American Public Media's Marketplace Budget Hero game to which Dana points us, I am struck once again by just how expensive the Bush tax cuts are. This is the scoreboard when you begin. It's the real-world long-term budget outlook as it stands today. When you play the "Repeal the Bush tax cuts" card, the situation improves markedly. With a little breathing room in the outlook, I added a few expenditures -- all non-defense, non-health care, non-Social Security items. Things like fully funding NCLB, providing more help to needy college students, cleaning up nuclear waste, and increasing funding for: the EPA (doubled), mass transit, subprime refinancing, and low-income housing, and more. Adding all possible defense spending initiatives brings ($390B for more foreign aid; $165B for increased homeland security; $93B to add two Army divisions; and several others) the "budget bust" date closer, but the forecast is still an improvement over the current situation. Because the defense category has a few big-ticket items, I removed them in a bid to fit health care and Social Security expansion into a workable budget. After adding over $1 trillion to mandate health insurance for all and over $300 billion to expand Social Security benefits for widows/widowers and low-income beneficiaries, the budget picture is still an improvement over today's outlook. It really is amazing how many spending priorities, like health care for all, expanded college assistance, a doubling of the FDA's budget, and on and on and on, would take a back seat to a set of tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich. Even more galling is that if the sun sets on the Bush tax cuts, tax rates revert to where they were in 2000, at level obviously not incompatible with an imminently robust economy.