IRL some people get really upset about the government being in debt. Could the game model that? Maybe among Conservatives and Capitalists more debt causes more unhappiness?
That could effect longer games where solving all your problems by overspending would have more sever consequences than it does now.
Actualy in real life there are only a few people who cares about government debt itself, and they are mostly professionals + some institutions.
As a matter of fact capitalists are quite happy with debts: the government pays for their mistakes/ risk takings: profit remains with capitalists and goverment carries the consequances/ burdens.
Examples: bail outs/ capital injections (mainly since 2008), quantitive easing, helicopter money during c19 lockdowns, and various other over spending (stimulus) fiscal policies/ money printing monetary policies.
So honestly debt itself is among the few question where both capitalists and socialist are in union: they prefer lesser taxation + larger spending which leads to government debt inevitably.
Conservatives, capitalist, socialist can/ often do disagree on WHERE money should be spent/ how much but that is modelled in the various policies.
BUT:
Actually you give me an idea:
Particular voter groups can be more unhappy (than they would be basically) in some case when a spending policy enacted/ certain spendings enlarged in case when that leads to far more deficit.
But that would be hard/ time consuming to implement via a mod.
while it’s bit tricky to get the deficit amount to moddable simulation, you can definitely add effective debt - approval override link by modding or modifying *.csv file directly.
nonetheless, I don’t think punishing debt itself will improve the gameplay experience. unless you are willing to break the game by fully embracing the debt crisis, debt already kind of punish those who are not familiar with tools and stats in D4. it will only end up making the game more difficult for the struggling players.
regarding the idea that some voter groups might get annoyed if a big spending is made in seemingly irrelevant sectors for them, it might be feasible and some policies do already have such links. I guess good examples would be rails/bus subsidies and military spending. adding more could be a good idea.
I do think that there is definitely a group of voters who DO care about debt. Sites like
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
only exist because people care about this stuff. Also, I think the now familiar ritual of US government shutdowns as parties argue about debt ceilings can only make political sense if you feel that there are voters out there who do have this is a concern,
Like anything, it really depends on degree. Am I concerned as a voter that the UK government runs a deficit and has a debt? well… yes, a bit, but if that deficit got much bigger and the interest payments got bigger, I;d be much more concerned.
I do think people are generally not aware of the impact of debt interest on government spending. In the UK, right now its apparently this:
In 2022-23, we expect debt interest spending to total £83.0 billion . That would represent 5.2 percent of total public spending, and is equivalent to £1,900 per household and 2.5 per cent of national income.
5.2% of our taxes being effectively wasted on interest payments is pretty concerning, but I’, not going to man the barricades over it. If it was 25%…then I think people would start worrying, but this is kind of already modeled in the game with the ‘debt crisis’ situation, which represents a mass of people taking decisions based on their concern about the debt. (Moving money offshore / emigrating / not investng etc).