Posted on 07/30/2012 6:34:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Hey students! Youth voters! Are you up for Hope and Change 2012? Here’s the deal! In just four years President Obama ran your personal share of the US debt from $30,000 to $50,000!! ...and still rocketing up!! Plus! You get to graduate from college with massive debt, and half of you will be underemployed or unemployed!! Plus! He character-assaults anyone who wants to reform entitlements to slow down the massive wealth transfer from poorer you to richer old geezers!! Plus! He promises you free stuff…then just puts it on your overcharged US credit card!! Plus! Some of us are closer to the end of our earning and tax-paying years than others. We aren’t gonna pay no stinking $50,000! Guess you’ll have to cover us!! Better get busy, suckers!! Hope and Change 2012…Tell a friend!!!”
Enthusiastic Facebookers know the angst of reconsidering impulsive rants. So, after reflection, I regret that my effort above—my “status” as the socially networked call it--from a few months back is so benign and understated.
Simply stated, few presidents in US history oversaw such total devastation of the prospects of young Americans. None gained office on a wave of youthful enthusiasm and adulation. None depended so desperately for reelection on reenergizing that same youth demographic to its historic former frenzy. None had a record as wretched as Barrack Obama from which to fashion a campaign pitch. Ominously, none faced a youth cohort so disengaged, deceived, superficial, and susceptible to cultural atmospherics that it just might work.
President Obama’s designs on a second term depend on energizing the very Americans his policies have hurt the worst: young workers, students, and others who will soon enter the workforce. His pitch seems to be: “I’m not the stiff, white businessman in a suit. I’m cool. I dig gay marriage (recently). I want to give you free stuff. Rock stars love me.”
The message tickles the hot spots of a generation raised on feelings, trophies for participation, and the preeminence of nice intentions. It is reinforced by a palace guard media that sees and reports no evil. But if more of those young voters would do something as boring and grown up as look realistically at a spreadsheet of their life’s challenges and opportunities, they might not willingly cast themselves as fodder for a conservative Thomas Franks to ponder: “What’s the Matter With Young Voters?”
The spreadsheet is grim, starting with prospects for the first job out of school. The official unemployment rate of 8.2% grossly understates the 15% or more who’ve been squeezed from employment. It’s reported half of graduates are failing to find work, or landing in low paying positions unrelated to their degree. The fiscal situation is further stressed by the record loans and debt weighing down about 60% of graduates—more than actually have good jobs.
Obama can declare “Mission Partially Accomplished” on a piece of his fundamental American transformation: Young adult living options are looking more European all the time, as scared fledglings flutter back to the security of the nest. That might account for Obamacare’s mandate that insurers cover children in family plans for several years longer: 26 is the new 18.
Of course, it’s only fair that mom and dad and their employer toss a little back to junior. He’s on the short end of the greatest, most perverse intergenerational wealth transfer in human history. Medicare and Social Security demonstrate government gets everything wrong. Those civically sacred entitlements play reverse Robin Hood, tapping deep into the earnings of the statistically poorest workers, the young, for the benefit of the statistically wealthiest Americans, households over 60.
Obama doesn’t just maintain this system. He blasts anyone who dares notice that bleeding fewer and fewer young workers to support more and more retirees is unsustainable. For proposing incremental entitlement reforms to restore fiscal stability and ease the surging burden on the young, Congressman Paul Ryan earned the presidential sobriquet “Social Darwinist.” It’s as if Ryan proposed something harsh like establishing utilization panels to decide which seniors deserve expensive treatment for serious health problems. But that would be extreme.
If you’re under 35 and reading this article, I wish you’d stop already and get back to work. The national debt will pile up about $3.5 billion more today. I’m getting nervous about my Social Security. Chop chop.
And don’t forget to volunteer and spread the word for the coolest president in history! Did you catch him on the Daily show?!
I think the GOP should make it a huge talking point to current young voters that tens of thousands of dollars of their money was voted out of there hands generations ago
It may piss them off at us geezers (I am almost 55 and I am pissed-off at the 70 and older crowd myself - Freeprs excluded ) but it needs to be done
“Can Obama Seduce Young Voters While Robbing Them Blind? Again?”
Yes, he can!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The clueless yute don’t realize that they owe $60,000 of national debt, and the meter is whirling like a dervish every day. Add in their tens of thousands of student loan debt that they can’t absolve by bankruptcy, plus the horrible job situation where less than half of college graduates are finding jobs, and one would think that they’d have better sense than to vote for the re-election of this abject failure of a president.
Perhaps if their too-patient parents would kick them out of their childhood bedrooms, they’d begin to see the light.
Some recent pundits have suggested thst obamma may wipe out your college debt out before the Nov elections, by putting the debt onto the US taxpayers. He is trolling for votes you know.
And it's not like anyone (Republicans) really explain how the National Debt will hurt them personally.
SS and medicare are running huge deficits now funded largely by government borrowing rather those dedicated payroll taxes. Yet both parties claim that those programs are self funded and solvent (by those magical IOUs) AND they see Grandpa and Grandma get their checks and their free electric wheelchairs.
Then there is the war in Afganistan and potential with Iran. It's hard to convince voters you are serious about national debt when arguing for more war spending. It always does the opposite.
OWS holds their one year anniversary bash on Sept. 17.
High on their list of demands is student loan forgiveness.
I expect Obama will use this occasion to announce that he will formally forgive all outstanding student debt if given a second term.
This will not only win him the support of the young skulls o’mush, but also with the large number of Black and Gender Studies graduates who can’t find a job, as well as young suburban couples struggling to pay a mortgage and their student loans.
This move will prove the #1 greatest threat in providing him with a second term.
Progressives: Peter Panderists. We’re all infants now.
Yes, they are even more clueless than their grandparents.
Bump
of course he is
He is counting on the ignorant to reelect him
Utterly meaningless to the tattooed and pierced voters of that generation.
Yes. One such college dingbat, who’s daddy runs a green company (I still want to know how much stimulus dollars they got), sat on my couch and proceeded to inform me that Obama caaaaares so much about people, that he’s blaaaack, and that we don’t need anymore old white men as POTUS.
Better known as the Penn State strategy.
>>He is counting on the ignorant to reelect him<<
I think that’s a reasonably accurate assessment. However, what’s being overlooked is the opportunity that Romney has to clear up some of that ignorance over the remaining course of the campaign.
His acceptance speech, for example, should address each of Obama’s core groups in turn, the young (being screwed by Obama), African-Americans (being consigned to the welfare dustbin once again by Obama’s recent welfare waiver), Hispanics (being treated like the next Democrat dependency group), and even gays (who are rapidly becoming characterized by the worst militants among them due to Obama’s publicity needs.)
He should even make a play for California and New York in his acceptance speech. Two large CA cities recently voted overwhelmingly to rein public employee unions. The handwriting is now clearly on the wall; CA is headed to bankruptcy and all the public works devastation that bankruptcy entails, poor police protection, decaying roads, decaying neighborhoods, rising crime, etc. Romney needs to address the problem, as Governor Scott Walker did in Wisconsin. He won’t win CA or NY, but he will start raising the Republican brand in those states once again.
Then carry through with the same messages in the debates, and finish up with positive advertising indicating where he wants to take the country (generally in the opposite direction it’s been going.) His one negative ad should be “Forward? Maybe we should change direction first?”
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