After you've gathered plenty of information about an issue that concerns you as a citizen, what should you do with it? Being able to locate information is not especially helpful if you don’t take the next step: analyzing that information to understand what it reveals. To be an informed citizen, you'll need to look at multiple sources of information and draw your own conclusions about what the data is telling you. For instance, you might look for cause-and-effect relationships and then try to predict what impact the issue (or related issues) will have on your future or the future of your community.

The slides below demonstrate one way to use the data about an issue to make some key inferences.

A search for “national debt" returns several websites that provide data about the amount of debt the U.S. owes. One of these sites, treasury.gov, provides a table that shows the daily debt totals for the last 20 years. According to this data table, how much has the national debt increased since 1998? The national debt today is almost four times what it was in 1998; it has increased from roughly $5.5 trillion to 20.4 trillion.   The website Treasury Direct provides a table listing the interest that must be paid on the national debt. Based on what the interest is so far for 2018, how much is it likely to total by the end of this fiscal year (the end of September 2018)? It will total over $620 Billion.   The search term “federal budget 2018” returns a web page that contains the chart above, which indicates where the government gets its income and where it spends that money. The chart shows that 6% of the money is spent just paying interest on the debt. According to the chart, what is the largest category of government spending? Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement benefits

A student who wishes to understand more about the nation's debt could make several inferences based on the information above. First, as shown by the chart on the first slide, the national debt continues to grow every year. If you understand how interest works, you can infer that if the debt continues to grow, the amount of money paid in interest will also continue to grow. If more money must be spent paying interest on the debt, there will be less available for other programs--or more taxes will be needed to fund those programs.

The more data you have to analyze, the more you will be able to identify detailed and accurate relationships. Therefore, try to collect as much data as possible about the issue you chose before reaching any conclusions.