Do you know what the national debt is at this moment? The answer is a whopping $19 trillion and it is increasing every minute! The Up to Us campaign at UCLA is aimed at raising awareness of America’s long-term fiscal challenges and finding out what people think about the national debt. We are currently competing against 52 other universities around the nation to see who can raise the most awareness about the issue of the national debt. Our main goal is to get students civically engaged and thinking about how the national debt and other fiscal issues affect our generation. One of our main tools is social media because millennials are constantly using it to communicate with their friends and to read about the latest news.
Our goal is to use our Facebook page (facebook.com/uptousucla) as a platform for students and members of our community to post their views on the national debt, submit videos, pictures, or creative projects. To incentivize students and our community to participate we are raffling out various prizes online such as gift cards, electronic devices, and various other items from the UCLA store throughout this week. We will also be holding a Mini-Carnival on campus on Friday, February 19 with our “Up to Us Treats Trolley” and interviewing students to see what they think about the national debt.
Millennials should be civically engaged and should care about what public policies are being proposed because they will directly affect our future. Economic issues such as the national debt pose several important questions to our society because ultimately a national budget reflects our values. One reason that millennials should be concerned about the national debt is that according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of interest payments on the debt will become the third largest category of the budget in less than ten years. All of these billions of dollars that will be paid on the interest of the debt could have been used to invest in education, infrastructure projects, or research. Thank you for supporting our campaign everyone!