Day+Six

It's Budget Time!  Life is pretty good in your country, you have a thriving culture, your government is pretty stable and your people are fairly happy...all except for one tiny little thing, you are not providing them with anything. You and your government decide that it is high time you provide some stuff for your people. On your profile page you have a budget of Expendatures that you must use to provide for your people, you can not spend anymore than that. Complete the tasks below. This will take you more than one day.

Part One:
 You will need:
 * Your Country folder and loose leaf
 * A laptop

 For example: Canada spends 12.7% of their total budget on Education. That equals 67.85 billion dollars a year. If you divide that by 33,759,742 people, it works out to $2009.79 per person, per year. Use the following link to help your compare if your expense amounts are reasonable. []
 * 1) Brainstorm a list of things that your people need to have provided for them from the government. Think back to the list we came up with as a class in the Poker Chips activity. It should be similar. Rank your list by order of importance.
 * 2) Look at the list of resources that your country already has. Put a star beside anything that your country has the resources for without having to purchase or trade from another country. (This may not apply to anything)
 * 3) You then need to decide how much money you will spend on each catagory that you will have in your budget. You will need to choose a dollar amount and then divide it by the number or people in your country to make sure that you are spending enough.





Part Two
Now that you have decided how your money will be spent, you need to release your budgets to your people. To do so, you will send out a Press Release that highlights the good parts of your budget and kind of breezes over the not so good. To make your expenditures easy to understand, you will also attach a graph showing how you will spend your money. To do this you must do the following things:


 * convert all of your totals to a percent. To do this you divide how much you are spending by the amount of money in your budget. You should get an answer that looks a little something like this (number will vary, 0.0153123. To find your percent, move the decimal two places to the right and then round to one or two decimal places. Your percent for this one would be 1.5% If you need help, I will help you.
 * Add up your percents. The total must be 100% or less. If it is less, use that percent for an emergency fund.
 * Use the [|Create A Graph] website to enter your budget data. Make sure that somewhere on your graph is your total budget amount (maybe in the title?) and show the rest as percents. When you are done, email your graph to danielle.stinson@rbe.sk.ca and I will print them in colour.

Reflect Questions
What did your group decide was the highest priority to provide for your people? Why did you decide this? Did you agree? What did your group decide was the lowest priority to provide for your people? How could your people suffer from your government making this decision?