Conference Sponsors

Tools to Help Understand Economics and Budgeting

In a bid to increase economic understanding of the Federal budget in the U.S., several news outlets have recently created balanced budget games and interactive tools making them available to the public.

Spanning several federal and state budget concerns, these tools list a myriad of options that allow an end user to see the implications of the issues on which he or she may vote in the future, or may have voted on during the last U.S. election cycle.

Some of these interfaces are calculators, and some have spectrum gauges to slide around until an even number is reached--some are seemingly absolutely impossible to try to attempt. But one thing is for sure about this trend, it looks as though news outlets are attempting to get a large amount of difficult to parse information across in an easy-to-digest way. Let's hope the trend continues, as an informed populace is a populace that will engage discussion about agendas comparatively.

As far as comparative studies of areas within the U.S. go, it might be worth mentioning that the Federal budget might take awhile and that the California state budget is much harder to balance than the Minnesota, Massachusetts, Arizona and New Jersey interactive tools combined.

Comments