The federal debt is a crime against college students and recent graduates. Americans born around 1990 are heading into the workforce this year with several times more debt than their parents had at the same age. Currently, the U.S. government owes over $16 trillion, up $6 trillion from 2008 and $10 trillion from 2000. The millennial generation will be expected to pay for this debt even though they did not vote on the policies that created it.

Young Americans fighting for prosperity and progress are running on a treadmill on which every attmept to move forward is met with a backward drag by debt. So far this fiscal year, 343 billion tax dollars have been spent simply on interest to maintain the existing debt. This money does not fund programs like Medicare, nor does it fund services like road construction. This is $343 billion in pure interest t  hat taxpayers lose every year. Americans cannot afford to continue to pay more and more taxes without receiving services and benefits back. As the debt gets bigger, it pulls more of us down.

Tackling the monstrous debt situation will require a change in attitudes and ideas regarding spending. Currently, the government uses a severely misguided budgeting strategy known as baseline budgeting. Under baseline budgeting, the budget of each department or program for each year is assumed to be equal to the budget for the previous year plus a built-in projected increase. Negotiations are then made with respect to this assumption that spending will always increase. Therefore, a budget allocation of “zero” means that a department’s funding actually increased by the projected amount. Even a “cut” to the baseline could still represent an increase in spending from the previous year.

In order to bring the debt down, voters must learn to reinterpret how the government talks about budgeting. It is just not enough to make cuts to a projected increase. We must settle for nothing less than a real, significant and immediate reduction in the actual number of dollars the government spends. At this time, the government would need to cut about $1.3 trillion in spending just to balance expenditures with revenues. More cuts will be needed in the future in order to pay down the debt and help our country begin to heal.