Live Radio
Think you could do a better job of balancing California’s budget than the state legislature? There’s an educational website where you can give it a try.
You're invited to try the California Budget Challenge for yourself. For a different set of choices, there's also their Federal Budget simulation.
Next Ten founder Noel Perry and his team have also developed a way to take the California Budget Challenge out of cyberspace and bring it into high schools and other remote sites, where participants are given hand-held clickers to use in making their choices.
The California Budget Challenge has proven to be a popular model for sharing budget issues with the populations that will be affected by the ultimate decisions. Perry reports that several cities and some other agencies have licensed their software to create localized budget challenges of their own.
To better understand the issues involved in California's budget, the Next Ten organization has also prepared an interactive quiz you can take to test your knowledge and assumptions about the state's spending and how we compare with the rest of the nation. Below is a sample page from the California Budget Challenge.
