With the national debt skyrocketing to more than $14 trillion, taxpayers across the country are getting fed up with the massive government spending. And at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, students are speaking out about the toll this debt could take on their future.
“We’re out here today with a centralized, national plan that Young Americans for Liberty set up to do a visualize the debt campaign,” said the group’s alumni spokesman. “We built a 40 foot long debt clock, as you can see behind me. It has over $14 trillion dollars. And we’re just illustrating to the students at UCF that we do have to pay this off.”
KnightNews.com caught up with U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and told him about the efforts from UCF students to discourage the wasteful spending by getting involved while still in college.
“Well they need to get involved because the decisions being made are going to directly impact the county that you’re going to inherit and are inheriting; and the economy that you’re going to go work in,” Rubio told KnightNew.com Editor-in-Chief Kevin Wolkenfeld. “And when your debt is larger than your economy you’ve got a major problem. And right now that’s the case, over $14 trillion and growing. We’ve got a major problem with this debt and it needs to be solved and you should inisist on your leaders to take it seriously.”
At UCF, University leaders have been under fire for allowing Student Government to spend thousands of public dollars on fancy retreats to world class, five-star resorts outside Walt Disney World, where the public paid for lavish meals. Most recently, UCF administrators signed off on allowing SGA leaders to throw themselves an annual goodbye party, where they gave themselves about $3,500 worth of trophies and awards, and spent $8,000 on the ceremony, with about $2,000 going to decorations and a fancy cloth alone.
What has raised more eyebrows, is how then-Student Body President Michael Kilbride invoked a federal privacy law known as FERPA, which was originally enacted to protect student education and grade records, to somehow black out his name from financial records showing his controversial spending decisions. KnightNews.com briefly showed the spending documents to Rubio to get his take on this lack of transparency.
“Transparency is always preferable to non transparency obviously,” Rubio said, while pointing out he did not yet know all the specifics of the situation in the short time KnightNews.com was able to meet with him.
Rubio shared some advice with UCF students, like those with the Young Americans for Liberty, fighting for a better future.
“What do you have to say to those students to motivate them?” Wolkenfeld asked Rubio.
“To stay involved in politics because they can make a difference,” Rubio said. “What I would motivate them with is, if we make the right decisions there’s no reason that the next 100 years can’t be greater than the last 100 years for America. But if we fail to make the right decisions, than they’ll be the first Americans to inherit a diminished country. So obviously, we know what we want to do. We want to keep it the greatest country in human history. But to do that will require us to act on things like the debt.”
