Reference no: EM133328552

Case: The lecture for this learning module discussed the issue of the federal government's budget deficit and the relationship between the deficit and the national debt. A group calling themselves The Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget has developed a budget simulation.

Your goal is to try to reduce the size of the federal government's debt. The goal of the simulation is to reduce the size of the national debt to 90% of GDP within ten years. (GDP is the measure of all of the goods and services produced in the U.S. economy in a year.) After reading the introduction, you will be asked to make a series of decisions about the federal budget (spending on various programs, increasing or decreasing various taxes). To help you make your choices, you can click on the description of each item to see more information about it. (This information is displayed at the top of the page, so if you are working on something at the bottom of the page, you may need to scroll up to see the additional information.) Your assignment is to go through the entire simulation and to try to meet the goal of reducing the national debt to 70% of GDP. I suggest that you take notes about the decisions that you make as you go through the simulation so that you can answer the questions below.

After you have completed the simulation, use the submission toll below to answer the following questions:

- Were you successful in reducing the national debt to 90% of GDP within 10 years?

- What were some of the choices that you made that decreased the debt the most? What were some of the choices that you made that increased the debt the most?

- If you were successful, what strategy did you use in making your choices that met the goal? If you were not successful, what choices did you make that kept you from meeting the goal? What decisions would you have to change in order to meet the goal? (Don't just tell me that you kept the things that you thought were 'necessary' or 'important' and got rid of the things that you did not think were 'needed.' Somebody thinks that each thing that the government does is necessary. How did YOU decide which things it was important to keep?)