When Professor Yarrow told us at the beginning of the semester that we would be participating in a U.S. Budget Exercise, I honestly didn’t know what to expect or think that it be as helpful and informative as it was. Our generation is focused on instantaneous technology, social networking, blogging, digital media, and so on. If you were to survey students on American University’s campus, I can honestly say that most of them would not be able to tell you how much the federal debt is today and how does it affect them personally. Therefore, our generation needs to be educated so that others who come after us will know how to try and get us out of this mess.

After listening to the discussions in class and watching the video and then conducting outside research, I feel that our generation will be greatly affected by the growing federal debt for a variety of reasons; the largest one being that it is going to affect the way we live more than we think it will. For one thing, our standards and cost of living have increased vast amounts over the years causing people to be more in debt to pay for their lifestyle at the current moment.

“Facing up to these challenges means coming to terms with many tricky and tough questions about things like health care costs, Social Security and government accountability. Among these questions is figuring out a more responsible approach than we now have to how we manage our yearly budgeting as a nation, in particular how we deal with deficits.” I think that this is the main cause of our issues and that there is no one fix to any of these situations. Also, seeing that some of these issues have been around for a number of years, they are not going to be fixed overnight.

The consequences that my generation will face in the future depends on how this administration and the next figure out a way to fix the issues of the federal debt and Social Security in a manner that will not only benefit the baby boomers (who are retiring now) but not make our generation suffer and pay for it. In conclusion, the growing federal debt will affect our generation even if a solution is put in place because of the lingering consequences that would be present. The only way to fix this issue is to create an education plan that would make our generation be more informed and aware of the growing federal debt.