44. How does the Eutopian budget work, and what does it do?
Each Term, the Eutopian government must operate within a budget; this is intended to add an element of realism to the game (i.e., political decisions come with a real cost, and sometimes it may be necessary to choose between various excellent policy programmes because not all of them may be affordable).
The budget process is intended to give players something to work with; it is not intended as a highly detailed breakdown of revenues and expenditures that would hold up to close scrutiny. Likewise, the budget process, while important, is not intended to be so complicated that players (and GM) have to spend massive amounts of time crunching numbers. Consequently, the budget operates in a very simplified fashion: it deals in very broad categories rather than specific programmes (e.g., funding will be decided for “welfare” wholesale rather than for any of the dozens of programmes that may constitute the “welfare” category), and it uses very approximate, large numbers (e.g., “foreign affairs” may be pegged at an expenditure of 1 billion ducats rather than, say, 1,234,567,890 ducats).
The way the budget process works in-game is essentially as follows: at the beginning of a Term, the Eutopian Central Bank provides the government with an estimate of federal government revenue and expenditure (based on taxation levels and programmes in place at the time). This serves as the fiscal framework for the Term. Revenue and expenditure are then affected by individual pieces of legislation passed by Parliament during the Term. In other words, there is no single, comprehensive budget law as such (unless Parliament actually decides to pass one); instead, taxation and spending provisions carry over from the previous Term, and are altered by any legislation passed during the present Term.
In order to make this work, members of Parliament are required to submit a brief fiscal impact estimate along with any bill they propose (i.e., a few lines specifying what sort of revenue and expenditure the bill is expected to generate). Fiscal impact estimates should be reasonable and plausible; numbers that appear outlandish will cause the Eutopian Central Bank to publish a correction. HOWEVER: neither players nor GM expected to conduct any major research for this - after all, the game is supposed to be fun and playable, and getting lost in fiscal arcana probably doesn't fit most people's idea of either fun or playability.

While *some* research will likely be necessary in a lot of cases, the idea is not to bog players and GM down with tons of fiscal research, but to strengthen realism when it comes to considering the impact of parliamentary bills.