National budgets are often not realistic. You can have highly socialist (I daresay communist) laws, with all types of entitlements and spending and stuff, and have a low government expenditure and low taxes. On the other hand, you can have very laissez-faire country, with no regulation, inhumanely low spending etc., and still have a fairly beefy budget and high taxes to go with it.
So, given the spate of calculators which have been released lately (currency converters, budget calculator, Rildanor calculators, political calculators - NPI calculator will come out soon), I figured that we could have an expdenditure calculator on Excel or something. It would have all the available laws on one side, a drop-down menu with all the options to go with each of the laws, and a cost next to it depending on which option you choose. In a separate area, you'd have an expenditure table, with all the costs tallied up and distributed to their appropriate departments (for example, foreign aid costs would go to the foreign affairs budget, and the healthcare system costs would go to the health/social services budget). This is probably going to involve Jess or Siggon.
Using this system, we could have more realistic budgets, and possibly more realistic RP. And budgeting would be more of a challenge (which may or may not be fun).