Soak the Rich Game

Fellow blogger, Ohioan and friend Jason Hart, created a terrific and fun game/graphic that allows you to "Soak the Rich" by giving you a turn at solving America’s $15.6 Trillion national debt.

It explains:

Politicians, the editorial page of The New York Times, the talent at CNN, and the average Fine Arts professor agree: the answer to America’s debt crisis is to make The Rich pay their “fair share.” With this consensus from such a broad swath of America’s leading minds, who are we to argue?

Let’s start with a realistic goal: the 2011 federal deficit of $1.3 Trillion. Click an industry to double income taxes on the nation’s largest employers and take all of their CEOs’ pay. For more information, simply click each industry you’d like to soak. Track your progress below, and click the “Show Results” button at any time to see the impact of your new taxes!

It shows a bunch of green (the color of money) boxes representing industries from Aerospace to Utilities. Below that is a red (color of debt) progress bar. Each individual tick on the progress bar equals $2.16 Billion in new taxes.

As you select an industry, an information box pops up. For instance, I selected Oil & Gas - evil companies that they are - and found this:

Soak Marathon Oil Corp. and the 39 other Oil & Gas companies in the S&P 500 index?

Doubling corporate income taxes and taking CEO pay will provide $63.9 billion in new taxes, undercut 22.1 billion shares of stock, and threaten 672,685 jobs.

Don't worry... some of those jobs are overseas!

Of course, my choice was "soak 'em" and not "cancel" which resulted in the progress bar turning green for about a quarter of an inch. So much for evil oil and gas.

You can then 'check your results' to see what you've accomplished. For my Oil & Gas selection, I managed to cover 4.8% of a single year's federal deficit. Oh - and with that same amount of money I could have bought "Wembley Stadium, a baker's dozen Boeing 787s, a Porsche 911 Turbo for yourself and each of your 99 closest friends, and 5 Manhattan penthouses overlooking Central Park with a cool $1 billion & change left over."

Check it out for yourself here and see if you can solve the budget crisis. Oh - be sure to share it with anyone who spouts off that taxing the rich is the solution.