Summer SAVY 2017, Session 2/Day 4- Policies and Politics (Rising 6th/7th)

Posted by morganr1 on Thursday, June 22, 2017 in SAVY.

Today in Policies and Politics we talked about balancing budgets.  We started the day off with a game called Budgetopolis.  I use this game in my work with elected officials in North Carolina.  The game puts the players into roles as Mayor, clerk, and board.  Once the game starts the players have to make hard cuts while keeping in mind their community’s needs, priorities, and the values.  They learned how hard it is to raise taxes, to make cuts when everything seems so important, and how tricky it is to pull down savings.  Our three towns (JJADville, Fameopolis, and Savyage Town) selected different community values, envisioned their populations differently and made some different choices.  That being said they made many of the same choices too.  They all consolidated services, they all privatized garbage collection, they all deferred capital investments of one kind or another.  What they did was try and protect their citizens from feeling the brunt of the cuts.  However, when revenues got tight our towns did have to start making really hard and unpopular choices. One group reduced the size of the police force, another closed down a fire station, and another increased property taxes.  Throughout the deliberations, the media (yours truly) “tweeted” responses to some of their choices.  You can see pictures of some of those tweets below.

After we finished up with Budgetopolis we moved on to studying actual political platforms and noticed that there are, not surprisingly, some partisan differences.  Even more than that though, we saw how much more political candidates like talking about where they will spend money or decrease taxes than how they would decrease spending or increase taxes!  Not us though!  We finished the day by trying to balance the federal budget.  Sadly, we were unsuccessful, but we did make a lot of hard decisions and now have a better appreciation for how hard it is to make these sorts of choices.

Tomorrow we are going to talk about what citizens can do to engage with this process!  We will talk about what government is doing to make it easier and how we can help our voices be heard.  We are also very excited to be getting ready for open house.  We hope that many of you can come and talk to us about Politics and Policies!

Whitney Afonso