In one of my classes we have been talking about how we would erase New Jersey’s $9 billion budget deficit. We did various activities, including a poll in our class and writing plausible lead stories amongst other things.
Today, we did this Budget Calculating activity as a class using the same aspects we used for all the other activities and it was interesting and shocking at the same time to see how knee deep we are. We are always saying we want the government to do more in providing funding for higher education but at the same time cut taxes and whatnot…. and this really helps put things in perspective.
In our class poll, we had to rank the ten aspects in order for which we would be most to least likely to do to counter the nine billion dollar budget deficit we are in. It was no shock that, as students, over half of us ranked cutting the higher education aid as what we would least prefer. From these ten aspects of the budget – how would you rank them to erase the budget deficit with 1 being your most preferred choice, 10 your least preferred?
You guys should try it. I found it pretty neat. The link above is, of course, only for New Jersey… but I’m sure you can find it for states as well online.
Oh and guess what? We are expecting ANOTHER snow storm tomorrow into Wednesday. This time I want it so it better happen (so just watch us not get any snow at all)! We got around seven or eight inches Friday night into Saturday and it’s forecasted to be in the 10 – 18 inches this time – i don’t even care if we get that much… just something substantive.
P.S. Don’t forget to leave me a comment below on your thoughts! As always, I’d love to hear from you.
