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Methodology & Sources

A campaign that brags about transparency owes you its math. Here's how every number on this site is built — and exactly where it's solid, where it's illustrative, and where it's a judgment call.

First, the honest disclaimer. This is a fictional, for-fun parody campaign. The policy figures are simplified, rounded, illustrative estimates for education and entertainment — not official CBO scores. The goal is to be directionally honest and internally consistent, not to be a federal budget.

Policy costs & the breakdowns

Each policy carries a single headline cost (or revenue) in billions per year, rounded to ballpark figures drawn from public estimates for comparable proposals. Every policy's "Why it costs this" breakdown is stored as line items that sum exactly to that headline number — so the parts always add up to the whole.

The budget & the surplus

The Budget page totals all spending policies and all revenue lines. New revenue (~$3.39T) exceeds new spending (~$3.11T), leaving a ~$278B surplus on top of a balanced budget. When we add a new spending policy, we either offset it or label it neutral, so the surplus is held honest rather than quietly eroded.

The Tax Lab

The Tax Lab runs your bracket schedule against a model U.S. income distribution (return counts and average AGI by income band), applies your standard deduction, and sums the tax owed. It's calibrated once so that "current law" reproduces actual federal individual-income-tax collections — then your custom plan is scaled by that same factor for an apples-to-apples comparison.

What it doesn't model: behavioral response (people changing how much they work, earn, or shelter), deductions and credits beyond the standard deduction, payroll/corporate/other taxes, or year-to-year economic change. It's a teaching tool for the shape of a tax code, not a scoring engine.

The Deficit page — live data

The national-debt figure and the average interest rate are pulled live from the U.S. Treasury (Fiscal Data API — "Debt to the Penny" and the average interest rate on the public debt), with a hardcoded fallback if the feed is unreachable. The payoff model is a standard amortization: we hold the debt-service budget steady at today's interest payment plus the surplus, so as the debt shrinks the interest bill shrinks and more goes to principal — the payoff accelerates. It assumes a flat interest rate and steady surplus; real rates, growth, and politics would move the date.

The Humanity Score

The score is a weighted blend of 13 dimensions of national wellbeing (economic output and security, physical and mental health, life expectancy, education, affordability, safety, opportunity, work & leisure, life satisfaction, environment, civic trust). Each dimension lists the specific real-world indicators behind it and the agency that publishes them. The weights sum to 100; the overall score is the weighted average. The dimension scores here are illustrative current readings.

The per-policy scorecards

Time-to-implement, difficulty, priority, and "odds it happens" are the campaign's honest self-assessment — subjective judgment, not measured data. Reforms needing a constitutional amendment read low odds on purpose; popular statutory fixes read higher. They're there to be candid about feasibility, not to predict the future.

Your privacy

The Tax Lab and "How does this affect me?" run entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere. The only network call the site makes is the public, read-only U.S. Treasury debt feed on the Deficit page.

Primary data sources

Figures are simplified for clarity and may not reflect the latest release. Spot something off? It's open source — corrections welcome.

See it in action

Check the math yourself

Open the Tax Lab → The Deficit & Debt