Reform health insurance. Adjust pensions. Top tax rate up, capital gains tax down, VAT up, food down. Cut unemployment benefits.
Fine. But — what does any of that actually achieve? How much is a billion? Ten? A hundred? And relative to what?
Without a feel for the orders of magnitude, and without an overview of all the other pots, there is little point in discussing individual sums. People talk about 100 million as though it were a lot — or very little. Most of us simply cannot picture these amounts any more.
Nor could I. So I set out to find all the figures and bring them together.
The data has been public all along
It is there; it just has to be collected: well validated up to 2024, and from then on the federal government's official estimate.
What surprised me was the distribution. The topics everyone is talking about right now — digitalisation, for instance — barely register in the budget. Other items are enormous and are discussed only in passing.
An app for moving the budget yourself
That is where Haushaltspilot came from. Not a professional simulation tool — more of a game. But you very quickly get a feel for where revenue and spending actually occur.
The raw data for validation is linked there. The interface still has room to grow, the figures are right, and the overview is good.
So if you fancy being finance minister for an afternoon: have a go. It is a little sobering, but instructive.
Why I build things like this at all
It is the same impulse as in my other projects: data that is public is not thereby accessible. Between "available" and "understandable" sits work — and that work decides whether a debate rests on figures or on feelings.
It is also an exercise in what I otherwise do for clients: take a scattered, inconsistent set of data, bring it together, validate it and present it so that someone can make a decision with it. That it happens to be the federal budget here rather than an operating budget changes nothing about the method.
Comments and suggestions for improvement are very welcome.
