OG-USA: Open for alternative gov't budget closure

[jdebacker]

On OG-USA landing page, we should add:

• Check box/radio button to toggle between budget rules: (i) transfers adjusted so that budget balances each period and (ii) No balanced budget, gov't spending adjusted after 20 years to hit SS debt/gdp ratio.
• Input box for target steady state debt/gdp ratio.

We'll have hover-overs for info that describes each of these rules.

Question:

• Do we need to display a note on OG-USA output page when gov't spending needs to go negative to close the budget?

CC @rickecon @salimfurth

[salimfurth]

I do think we should alert users when their options have pushed G negative.

[jdebacker]

Ok - we'll need to figure out how to display that in the table.

What could be really neat is to produce a graph showing the relevant fiscal rations over the transition path: taxes/gdp, debt/gdp, gov't spending gdp (maybe transfers/gdp, but that is assumed constant).

[salimfurth]

Agreed - either a graph or table of the ratios. Worth showing transfers even though it's fixed; it reminds users where the money is going.

[PeterDSteinberg]

@jdebacker Can you clarify OG-USA landing page: does that mean the landing page after you press Link to Dynamic Simulation button, e.g. this URL - https://www.ospc.org/dynamic/10539/?start_year=2017 ?

[jdebacker]

@PeterDSteinberg No, I mean the page where one enters the parameters for the OG-USA model. It is what you see when you were able to click the "Overlapping Generations Simulation" button on the page you shared. I think it's this page.

[PeterDSteinberg]

Hi @jdebacker @rickecon . I am working on this and issue #481 with @brittainhard 's help. Can you clarify a couple things for me:

• Regarding the following items, can you explain how these parameters should be passed to the OG-USA execute.py functions - are OG-USA modifications needed or are these parameters already supported/named?

  Check box/radio button to toggle between budget rules: (i) transfers adjusted so that budget balances each period and (ii) No balanced budget, gov't spending adjusted after 20 years to hit SS debt/gdp ratio. Input box for target steady state debt/gdp ratio.

• I've been out of OG-USA for a couple months until last week or two. Can you explain how the code should quickly check for this criterion below so the output page can be modified:

  when gov't spending needs to go negative to close the budget?

[jdebacker]

@PeterDSteinberg asks:

Regarding the following items, can you explain how these parameters should be passed to the OG-USA execute.py functions - are OG-USA modifications needed or are these parameters already supported/named?

• A boolean can be passed as a kwarg to the execute.runner() functions that switches on/off the unbalanced budget. If budget_balance=False, then the budget closure rule is used.
• The other parameter of the unbalanced budget model is the SS debt to GDP ratio. This parameter is named debt_ratio_ss and can be passed to execute.runner() in the user_params dictionary kwarg.

Also

I've been out of OG-USA for a couple months until last week or two. Can you explain how the code should quickly check for this criterion below so the output page can be modified: when gov't spending needs to go negative to close the budget?

We don't have this coded up yet. @rickecon do you want this initially? I'm not sure how it would display on the web app... If we do add, I would do something like, in SS.py at around line 1030, add:

if output['Gss'] < 0:
   print('Warning: The combination of the tax policy you specified and your target debt-to-GDP ratio results in an infeasible amount of government spending in order to close the budget (i.e., G < 0)'

cc @rickecon

[PeterDSteinberg]

@jdebacker (apologies for missing this for a 6 days) - My thought is we should complete the work as well as we can now to take and pass the right inputs, perhaps deferring the check discussed above for gov't spending needs to go negative to close the budget to a separate issue. We can go ahead and add the snippet to OG-USA (I'll make that PR now):

if output['Gss'] < 0:
   print('Warning: The combination of the tax policy you specified and your target debt-to-GDP ratio results in an infeasible amount of government spending in order to close the budget (i.e., G < 0)'

We may make a separate issue to ensure that the warning above is conveyed to the webapp - not sure exactly what is involved there yet if we want to put that warning on the results page.

cc @brittainhard

[PeterDSteinberg]

PR in OG-USA with the Gss warning: https://github.com/open-source-economics/OG-USA/pull/319