In the video “What you need to know to play The Fiscal Ship game,” Sheiner (2016) explains the mechanisms that regulate the allocation of financial resources. Simply stated, the speaker describes how the government spends money and what trends will be apparent in this sphere in the near future. Among those are further aging of the population and a gradual but stable increase in medical spending. If they continue, social security as well as health programs will require 70% of the state budget by 2046 (Sheiner, 2016, 7:49). Such tendencies overload the monetary system and contribute substantially to the national debt.
Meanwhile, it is not necessarily reasonable to regard the situation at a federal level, as it may differ from one state to another. According to Morgan et al. (2015), municipal authorities are responsible for spending not less than 40% of the taxes that the citizens pay. Therefore, although local governments are integral to the nationwide political system, different communities may invest dissimilar sums in health care as well as social security.
In the closing part of the video, Sheiner (2016) speculates on the inappropriate course of the state budget that needs a correction, highlighting that slight changes to the tax police will not be sufficient. In fact, however, small changes are hypothetically able to satisfy the increasing needs. Local authorities are hierarchical themselves, for instance, cities are under the chain of command of states; normally, the latter prevent the former from a full access to taxes (National League of Cities, 2016). Reconsidering this system would probably allow for additional revenues at the level of cities, hence paying the debts of a particular community and eliminating its contribution to the state debt.
References
Morgan, D.F., Robinson, K.S, Strachota, D., & Hough, J. A. (2015). Budgeting for local governments and communities (1st Ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN-13: 978-0-7656-2780-3
National League of Cities. (2016). Paying for local infrastructure in a new era of federalism: A state-by-state analysis. Web.
Sheiner, L. (2016). What you need to know to play The Fiscal Ship game [Video]. Web.