There’s plenty of evidence that younger workers may face the most difficult economy since the Great Depression. The national unemployment rate is 7.5%, but it’s 16.1% for 16-to-24-year-olds.
Maybe when these kids [and their parents] see themselves stuck at home with shrunken prospects for advancement, they'll realize that most of what they learned in college sociology was pure bilge.
No one really owns their own home in America, they just rent it from the government. Why don’t I just let my landlord deal with all that and rent my home from him? Then again, I don’t understand boomers with their romanticized ideal of home ownership. Some of us could buy a home anytime we wanted to (I certainly could); we just don’t see it as worthwhile.
It’s all summed up by the lack of religion in their lives. Once you pull that out, they live for the day and only for themselves.
I’m in my early 30s, and I find the idea that somehow 16-34 is a generation to be ludicrous.
I remember:
A time when people didn’t know what the Internet was
A time when people didn’t have cell phones. No one in my high school had a freakin’ cell phone. All of them do now.
A time when you could get on a plane without being treated like a terrorist because there was no war on terror.
Batman movies were directed by Tim Burton.
Popular music still had guitars.
I could go on and on...
Sme of you may dismiss them but Millennials are a larger cohort than any other in history. Bigger than the Boomers and absolutely dwarfing Gen X. By 2023 they will be 75% of the workforce. Love em or hate em you will have to deal with them. They are just too big.
They're not interested in buying because the entitlement mentality makes them wait for it to be GIVEN to them!
What’s this 16 to 34? Generation X is currently 27 to 47. Don’t be making us even smaller! Millennials are currently 6 to 26. Maybe that’s why they’re not buying houses.
“... worry about the future of the U.S. economy”
Here are two quotes from the historian Will Durant:
“Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”
“Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”
Don’t forget those college loans they’re paying off.
It takes jobs to have money and our unwise trade polices have created an economy that is only providing jobs for Chinese.
I was 35 before I bought my first home, so I cut them some slack in that regard. Until that point in my life I was moving around too much chasing opportunities to make buying seem like a good option. When it did come time to buy I had easily 10% to put down.
I think alot of kids are being sold on the “college degree” path, which really means the “student loan” path, and they might have been better off in the long run learning a skill or trade.
I don’t know, but I think a lot of us here have seen the scary rage we evoke from the young when we say something outside of what they were indoctrinated with in regards to history, the America of our youth, or politics, teachers, environment and such, they go from zero to spitting rage within seconds.
They seem to live in their heads and fantasy rather than to want to jump in their cars and go adventuring and touring the back roads, seeing how others live, experiencing life, and books are starting to seem like something mysterious and disturbing to them, something “old” something used to annoy them and which hold the lies of the “old” people, who need to die off.
McDonald’s - illegal aliens
Taco Bell - illegal aliens
Wendy’s - illegal aliens
Burger King - illegal aliens
Theater ticket taker - illegal aliens
Ice-cream shop - mostly illegal aliens
Construction - illegal aliens
Roofer - illegal aliens
Mowing lawns - mostly illegal aliesn
Newspaper delivery - 70% gone, rest is illegal aliens
Freepers are mostly old, and mostly out-of-touch with how A LOT of hiring decisions now go. They don’t like illegal immigration one white, however it’s true that the group most impacted by it is the work ethic of our young people.
Those jobs are WHERE THEY LEARN THE VALUE OF WORK —it’s being given away.
My son, nearly 19, doesn’t have his driver’s license yet, not for lack of trying. When I was a kid, you took driver’s ed for a few weeks, you practiced driving for a couple of months with your learner’s permit, you took your test. Didn’t pass the first time? You went home, practiced what you got wrong, went down the following weekend, took your test, all over.
Now, in my state, you must take the driver’s ed and have a learner’s permit, but you must also keep a log of your driving, racking up a minimum of 60 hours (which translates to a few thousand miles of driving). Then, you need to make an appointment for the driver’s test, which usually is some months off. The test is no longer once around the parking lot at the DMV, a three-point turn, and parallel parking. Now, it’s a major road test, including driving through an urban area, on a superhighway, etc.
If you fail, you need to make another appointment, which is some months off. And forget about making an appointment for a time that might be convenient to you. It’s what’s convenient to the state.
I hope it makes for safer drivers, but it certainly makes for fewer drivers, too.
As for actually buying cars and houses and the like, my son looks at what happens to kids getting out of college, and it isn’t pretty. The economy just isn’t generating good, career-type of jobs in the quantities that will allow the economy to absorb 4 million young folks reaching adulthood each year.
For this reason, too, he’s eschewed student loans. He actually turned down his first choice for college because it would have required $20K - $40K of loans to get through, while his second choice is one that between us, we can pay the tuition the school requires of us out of my income and his earnings, and his third choice, if he’d have accepted it, was free.
Folks his age are much warier about borrowing large sums of money that will require decades to pay off, especially in amounts that stretch the outer fringes of their budgets. When my wife and I were young and looking to buy a home, we were told, buy all the home you can afford, get as large a mortgage as they’ll give you. Over time, your income will steadily increase, and the property will appreciate, and you’ll be fine.
Today, neither part of that equation works so well.
I view it as a precocious wisdom when I see young folks acting so prudently about taking on large amounts of debt.
When I was a kid, I was amazed by this one guy’s HO Scale slot car racing track in his basement. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. My son got old enough and we put together a nice HO Scale racetrack. It had buildings and trees and lights and people. I came home from work after we finished it and he was playing Mario Cart on his game system. He wasn’t the least bit interested in that race track. Now, he can drive a Ferrari through Paris on his game system. The make believe world is fancier and more exciting than the real world, and you earn points.
They are not mature enough to do much of anything and their “parents” are not much better since they failed to raise their children, not mention grandma/pa are also guilty since they failed to raise children that had the discipline to raise children. The “Greatest Generation” came back from WWII then sat on their asses.
I heard the same crap about the "Boomers" in the early seventies. We wouldn't be able to provide for our retirements because our parents owned all the stock and there wouldn't be any for us to buy. We wouldn't find jobs, because our parents wouldn't give them up.
Yada, yada, yada. It's always the same and no one thinks to blame government intervention in the economy as the root of the problem.
As a Young Gen Yer myself, it never ceases to amaze me at how people love to talk about how I live my life.
Seriously, it’s rough out there. Sure a lot of us are spoiled brats but look at who raised them. A lot of them are Ex-Hippie loser Boomers who never grew up and parented properly.
We’re trying to make it by, a lot of us want to have families and not live in a debt ridden lifestyle, which means putting off houses and cars.
Not only that, but it’s really demoralizing to hear Boomers and Gen Xers talk about how rotten it is and say things like, “Man I don’t envy you guys, the country’s going to collapse. You missed out.”
If people gave us half a chance, I think we could rise up to the occasion.
They’re all living with mom and dad, living off school loans well into their late 20’s and early 30’s. Outright Communism is the only hope they have.
Well, that explains why they drive Honda’s if they drive at all.