When I’ve done online budget exercises, I’ve earned results such as “minimalist” and “classic conservative.”

Now I’ve taken another do-it-yourself budget quiz and this time I’m supposedly a “disciplined trimmer.”

Since being a “trimmer” sounds too timid (“slasher” would be more appropriate), I prefer where it says I hold “the firmest line” and made “hard trade-offs.”

I got this result by selecting (in my opinion) the most sensible choices that the Washington Post provided in an interactive budget exercise.

Here’s how the Post describes it.

The debt is projected to continue rising inexorably unless dramatic steps are taken to rein it in. How would you accomplish that? Now you have an opportunity to find out, choosing various options and seeing their effect on the deficit in the 2030s. Would you raise Social Security taxes, cut benefits or both? Reduce payments to Medicare providers and private plans? Cut federal programs and/or raise income taxes? Or would you bet that a booming economy will do most of the work? The deficit this year is over 6 percent of GDP, higher than in any year of the Great Depression. A bipartisan target for deficit reduction is to cut it to 3 percent.

For what it’s worth, I did not achieve the goal of lowering the 2036 deficit from 6.7 percent of GDP to 3 percent of GDP.

That’s probably because I did not accept any of these tax increases.*

Why don’t I accept tax increases?

For the simple reason that America’s fiscal mess is entirely caused by a growing burden of government spending and I see no reason to punish taxpayers. Instead, good fiscal policy is based on spending restraint.

This also explains my choices for Social Security. As you can see, I picked every possible option that doesn’t involve grabbing more money from taxpayers.

Though I was disappointed I didn’t have an option tot shift to personal retirement accounts.

Here is the Post‘s summary of my overall choices.

With the above choices, I did get the deficit down from 6.7 percent of GDP to 4.6 percent of GDP.

However, I need to point out that the Post‘s quiz did not list several budget-slashing items that would have warmed my heart.

For instance, I was not given the option of block-granting Medicaid. Or phasing out food stamps.

There also was no ability to shut down counterproductive government departments such as Education, Energy, HUD, Agriculture, and Transportation. Heck, I wasn’t even given the option of capping discretionary spending.

Hopefully the Post will do a similar exercise with more options next year so I can be a “wanton slasher” rather than a mere “disciplined trimmer.”

P.S. You can see some of my other do-it-yourself budgets by clicking here, here, and here.

*I very much want to get rid of the tax deduction for employer-provided fringe benefits, as well as the mortgage interest deduction, but only as part of revenue-neutral tax reform.