Our Generation is screwed, and no one seems to care. Generation Z is our name, and we are due to inherit the bankrupt and hypocritical pieces that the current generations are about to leave us.

On Sept. 8, the U.S. debt clock hit $20 trillion for the first time in history. Just to give a bit of perspective, even if the government were to completely stop spending money it would still take six years worth of Federal Tax Revenue just to pay it all off.

This number is only growing larger, and Congress has not taken any steps towards balancing the budget. Instead Congress is about to pass tax reform that will only cause the debt to accumulate at a faster rate. I’m all for more economic freedom, but tax cuts can only come in a time when the government doesn’t need as much of our money.

Even if both parties were willing to cut ties with the special interest groups that fund their campaigns, we would have to trim 15 percent of our annual budget just to break even, which still wouldn’t be enough to chip away at the debt that is about to be dumped on us.

The problem is: Democrats are always finding new ways to waste federal dollars, because every person dependent on government programs is another vote for Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans never have the stones to take the wasteful programs away because they don’t want to risk losing votes.

This repetitive process just means that the tab will only be passed on to the next generation of tax payers, which is us. Our generation will inherit so much accumulated debt that within a few years, 10 percent of each dollar we give the government will be spent just on the interest for our debt.

For some people there is a beacon of hope. America is finally more accepting…for the most part. It seems as if the more unique or diverse you are, the more society cares about your opinion. But it seems to me that if you’re religious, white, or even just conservative, anything you have to say falls on deaf ears.

This concept isn’t necessarily new, but something that is even more troubling is that we’re now reaching a point in which speech is often no longer protected just because it may offend some people. According to a study from Newsweek, 50 percent of millennials think it is acceptable to shout out a speaker that doesn’t agree with your views, and just shy of 20 percent are ok with violence to limit whatever they consider “hate speech.”

I am not trying to create a straw man argument with this one specific trend on college campuses. The idea of trying to create a society more accepting of ethno-cultural minorities, at the cost of other ethno-cultural groups, extends into government policy and the private sector as well.

Affirmative Action has acted as the method for getting more minorities into college, regardless of whether or not they’re the most qualified student for the role, at the expense of qualified white and Asian-American students.

The idea of diversity in the workplace used to mean getting more perspectives on a project and creating a workplace in which everyone has an equal chance of advancing and getting a promotion.

However, we’re now at the point where companies are just hiring more women and minorities so that we can all just pat ourselves for a job well-done. In fact, 70 Fortune-500 companies have established arbitrary gender quotas in management positions, which has made opportunity to advance in private companies unequal again.

What we should be doing about all of these issues is actually tackling the problems facing the majority of black and Hispanic communities, such as rampant crime and poor education. Instead of taking the relatively easy route of not addressing these issues, it’s time we had politicians and leaders roll up their sleeves and face the causes of modern day inequality.

It’s time for our generation to start familiarizing itself with the problems that our representatives of today are ignoring, problems that will eventually fall to us. It’s time to watch the news (and I mean real, credible news), it’s time to actually learn the platforms of our nation’s leaders, and it’s time to stop being overly sensitive, because if not our generation’s future will not be nearly as promising as ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­generations before us.