KIDS CONFRONT U.S. BUDGET WOES

Junior Achievement helps schools to explain how Congress makes budget-cutting decisions on the national deficit.

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Call Junior Achievement at (317) 634-3519.

Few kids expect to go to their seventh-grade social studies classes and assume the roles of congressmen and congresswomen, laboring over debt and deficit decisions.

But for students in central Indiana, these roles may be part of their school experience. Kids in middle schools and high schools have the chance to see what it's like to make monetary decisions for the country, according to Joseph Farah, vice president of education for Junior Achievement of Central Indiana.

Using a lesson plan designed by Farah, students look at the U.S. budget, carve it up and try to reduce the deficit.

Farah's hope is that kids will begin to understand the problems facing Congress when trying to determine cuts in our national budget.

"When we start doing this exercise, it becomes very difficult to start cutting things out. Because when you start cutting things out of the budget, you start cutting out things that somebody wants or needs.

"For example," continues Farah, "we can cut out student loans, but that's going to affect your generation. Or we can cut out some Social Security entitlements, and that would probably affect your parents and grandparents.

"So everybody has an interest in certain things that are part of the federal budget. So it becomes a very, very political, as well as an economic, problem."

His federal budget deficit lesson plan is part of the Project Business curriculum created by Junior Achievement and used by 28,000 Indiana students in 33 counties, according to Farah.

Classroom ideas range from convincing members of Clinton's economic team to decide whether to reduce the debt or stimulate economic growth, to designing and conducting a survey to determine how much other students know about the deficit.

Time to pay the bill

Regardless of the time spent in the classroom, the activities can stimulate future thinking.

"As the deficit started to grow throughout the 1980s, more and more economists and politicians started to look at it and the impact it was going to have on the future," Farah says.

One of the reasons for the economic problem, Farah explains, is that the deficit was created by all the things his generation wanted.

"(The deficit) is all the things we thought were important that we needed, everything from bridges to roads, and government expenditures for wars and all that. Now it's coming time to pay the bill. . . . And you're going to be servicing this debt at $300 billion a year. Which is the largest line item in the budget. . . . It's going to limit some of the things you may want to do."

The primary goal of debt curriculum is to make young people aware of the deficit problem, Farah states.

"It makes them aware of the importance of economics in their lives. Because your generation is going to inherit this thing.

"What that means is that part of the American dream is being watered down a bit," he continues.

"The fact that the children of today may not be able to have the quality of life of the former generations is a frightening thing," Farah says. "Your future is tied into how this economy performs. If the economy doesn't perform well, there won't be jobs out there for you to have."

Americans in general are not informed enough to actually know how bad the situation is, Farah explains.

"The American public is not too literate economically. By that I mean, we all don't just go home and read books about economics at night, right? That's the last thing we want to do. It's pretty sophisticated stuff and we depend on the Congress and other experts and specialists to tell us what's going on.

"We felt that the subject is a little bit too important just to leave to experts to interpret for us."

Farah suggests one possibility to eliminate the debt.

He says that the gross domestic product _ all the goods and services produced in the U.S. annually _ is only about $2 trillion more than the national debt, or $5 trillion to $6 trillion.

"So if we took everything that we made and produced and apply it towards the national debt, we'd pay it off," says Farah.

If you're a teacher and a skeptic of this debt lesson, he has some advice.

"Look at the lesson plan, try it out, take it yourself. . . . If fact, look at the budget yourself and try to pick a couple of line items you would like to cut."