The United States' $10 trillion national debt may be costing the nation, but College freshmen John O'Malley and William Son aren't too unhappy: they gained $500 from it.
The two are the winners of a student video contest hosted by Students Face Up to the Nation's Finances, a project of a national campaign to raise awareness about the federal deficit called Facing Up.
"Students Face Up began as a pilot study targeting students on campuses across the nation to incorporate the federal budget into the curriculum," said Shaheen Hasan, a representative from Public Agenda, the nonprofit organization behind Facing Up.
O'Malley and Son got word of the contest from their Political Science professor, Donald Kettl, who led a seminar last semester called The Future of American Politics. Their winning video, "Man on the Street 2: Facts and Figures," is just the tip of the class's iceberg.
Every person in the class had to turn in a project at the end of the course, O'Malley said, and these projects later became part of the class Web site, Pound-It.org. Because O'Malley and Son could not submit the Web site as a whole to the contest, they had to make a smart selection.
In the video, O'Malley and Son ask a few Penn students to estimate the values of the national debt and the federal budget. Then they reveal the answers - and the reactions are worth seeing.
The video was described by the judges in a press release as "an excellent slice of life on campus . [that serves] up a few shockers and surprises along the way."
"It was important that the video was as real as possible," O'Malley said. "We wanted real reactions, real emotions."
And they got exactly what they wanted - the surprised faces of their interview subjects attest to the video's goal.
Though most people they interviewed seemed to know vaguely the extent of the nation's debt, O'Malley said, no one truly understood the severity of the situation.
The creators hope the video will change that.
"They found a way to talk about [big economic issues] in a way that gets to the core issues that ordinary people, not just the policy wonks, can care about," Kettl wrote an e-mail. "I'm proud of the work they did."
O'Malley and Son said they were surprised about the win, despite the effort they knew they had put into the project.
What was its charm? "I don't know," O'Malley said with a laugh. "I guess our video was entertaining, but it still mixed in the seriousness of the issue."
But the two do know that the public should all be more informed of our nation's current economic state.
"What we're hoping for with our video is for people to . become more impassioned about this issue," O'Malley said. "Everybody in America owns part of that debt and we're all being affected."
