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Balancing Budget Handout
1. As a team, return to the Web site: http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/money.html*.
2. Look through the departments and programs that receive funding from the federal government and discuss with your group members how you think the U.S. government allocate its budget. (Hint: You may want to look for huge expenditures and trim them or find smaller programs to rid of entirely.)
3. Decide as a group, by agency name, which expenditures you will trim. List these. Are there areas that should receive more funding? List these.
4. Analyze what happens to the budget when you start to increase and decrease areas based upon what your group feels is important. Explain your analysis.
5. Continue until you have reached a balanced budget, reduced the deficit, or increased funding to areas you think will increase the country’s wealth.
6. When you’ve achieved a set of allocations that your team believes in, click the link labeled “Next: Results of your changes.” If this is the way your team believes the U.S. budget should be, you can save your results by choosing “File: Save As…”. If you save the file as an HTML document, you will get the charts displayed. (You will use this data in the final project in which you make your persuasive case to lawmakers.)
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