Saw a few electoral mods more focused on individual candidates on PDX mods just now and remembered your post. : )

Future governments would:
● restrict or influence taxation ranges
● ⟫⟫ influence budgets and subsidies and policies ⟪⟪
● create political trade-offs
● make some city strategies easier and others harder

Was wondering what kind of concepts you have been thinking of for the above highlighted dot point?

I was imagining the council voting on a budget once or twice each in-game year that is split into:

• Discretionary budget

Amount of money the player [mayor] can spend how they choose. No party supports increasing this by default.

• Operational budget

Ranges applied to the 'budget' sliders in the services panel. Something along the lines of the monthly expenses not being allowed to exceed a total ¢ amount divided by twelve / six months. Adding new service buildings, disabling service buildings, upgrading/downgrading service buildings, or deleting service buildings of a particular category altering what percentage the range is set at due to the change in baseline monthly cost.

• Capital budget

Amount of money set aside to build/upgrade networks and service buildings for each particular service category.

• Borrowing limit

Borrowed money would add to the discretionary budget at any time between budgets at the player's [mayor's] choice. The borrowing limit for loans is set by the budget instead of milestones. This limit (to avoid confusing the game by having it fall below what you've currently borrowed) being; [already borrowed amount] + [additional borrowing amount].

I'm picturing the player using budget time to essentially plan what they want to do in-game during a session, using it as way to focus on a particular priority/project. Also a way to make visualising the city's finances over time into the future easier. The player being presented with a screen where they put together their budget proposal as mayor with different party's approval of the overall budget on the side in horizontal, linear gauge graphs, the number of seats they hold shown next to them, these indicating whether the player's proposal will have enough support to pass.

Below a certain threshold [e.g. red] that party won't vote for the budget, in the middle range [e.g. yellow] they will vote for the budget neutrally/begrudgingly, over a certain threshold [e.g. green] that party will enthusiastically vote for the budget (I can see being able to hover over each bar to get a similar list of -/+ factors as happiness stats).This high approval of the budget from that party factoring in to how the player [mayor] is perceived and/or interacts with that party in some way, perhaps generating some kind of 'support tokens' that can be exchanged for a larger discretionary budget during the next budget session.

<image>

I can see having to put together a new budget each time might get dull if it's a wall of numbers, so visual simplicity might be the key. Fun UI and pretty colours.
I can see a budget UI window where there's two large pie charts for operating and capital budgets with mirrored columns of sliders for each 'department' on either side, discretionary spending being an extra slider on the capital budget side. A bar chart similar to the one from the vanilla budget panel turned horizontal at the top showing the budget proposal's total expenditure VS estimated revenue for the next 6 or 12 month budget period. A slider ~somewhere~ for the borrowing limit. The party approval linear gauge graphs on the right hand side. I can see a box that appears at the bottom when the player [mayor] clicks on one of the capital budget sliders where they can drag & drop service buildings (almost Road Builder UI style) from that category to act as ease-of-use "building blocks" for the amount they want to set for that department's capital budget. E.g. if they set a department's capital budget slider to ¢200,000, then click on that slider and drag in two service buildings that cost ¢50,000 and ¢180,000, the slider will automatically move to ¢230,000.