Have you ever wondered how much of the budget is actually spent on young adults? Young Invincibles and National Priorities Project partnered to find out just how much the U.S. is investing in education and job skills training for young Americans. The results we found were pretty disturbing:

• We spent more on the war in Afghanistan than on total education spending in 2010.
• The U.S. has fallen from 1^st to 12^th in the world in educational attainment.
• We have cut $1 billion in the last ten years from workforce training programs.
• There are 6.7 young million adults that are “disconnected,” which means they’re not employed or in an education program, and our workforce training programs only serve 5% of them.

The lack of investment in our generation is no longer just a budget issue, but an international competitiveness issue.  America needs to make the investments now to make sure we stay competitive in the future, or else we risk losing our economic edge.

Looming over the existing disinvestment in America’s youth is the threat of sequestration. What’s sequestration? Here’s a quick rundown.

Last fall, Congress put together a Debt Supercommittee to try and tackle the growing deficit. To make sure they did their job, Congress included $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts if they couldn’t come up with a good proposal.

They still haven’t found one, so unless Congress acts on January 1, 2013, there will be $1.2 trillion cut from the budget across almost every program. These cuts could have a devastating effect on youth jobs and education programs.

Make sure your voice is heard during this critical time.  Tweet why you think Congress needs to #Budget4theFuture.  Follow Young Invincibles at @YI_Care to get real-time information about the fight against these cuts.  Be sure to check out our report to find out where the U.S. is failing our generation.