Free Republic

While only about 18 percent of Gen X women were married by 40, the number of their Millennial counterparts waiting till age 40 to tie the knot could now almost double, according to a recent study. Using data from the American Community Survey to estimate age-specific marriage rates, Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute finds that the percentage of Millennials marrying by age 40 will fall lower than for any previous generation of Americans, even in a scenario where marriage rates recover considerably. In the early millennium period, from 2000 to 2004, the peak first marriage rate for single U.S.-born women at...

While enlistment rates in the U.S. military vary by group, they also vary by state. Enlistment ranges from less than 3 per thousand in North Dakota to more than 7 per thousand in Florida and Maine. According to the Defense Department, differences exist at the regional level as well. In 2013, 44% of all military recruits came from the South, despite it having only 36% of the country’s 18-24 year-old civilian population. By contrast, the Northeast was the most underrepresented region of the country; only 14% of new enlistments came from this area, compared to 18% of its 18-24 year-old...

Kinda course but truthfully funny

The federal Highway Trust Fund, which provides transportation funding to the states, is projected to run dry in August. But with a technology-driven revolution underway in the way Americans use surface transportation, applying yesterday’s solution and simply replenishing the fund won’t solve the problem. According to the Obama administration, if the fund is exhausted, states will be forced to put off 112,000 highway construction and 5,600 transit projects, resulting in the loss of 700,000 jobs. When dealing with the government, there are always plenty of zeroes to go around. The traditional source of revenue for the trust fund is the...

Must Evangelical churches change or downplay their position on homosexuality to attract millennials? Millennials, generally defined as those ages 18 to mid-30s, are the most supportive of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, many polls show. A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll had their support at 69 percent, the highest of any age group. Even among self-described Evangelicals, the millennials showed the highest level of support at 43 percent (though the poll only included white Evangelicals), compared to 33 percent for generation X, 22 percent for Baby Boomers and 19 percent for those 68 and older. The poll also...

NEW YORK ( MainStreet) — Andrew Snead, 23, headed back home after graduating from Bentley University with a degree in finance and economics so he could bolster his lackluster savings. Snead, who works at Private Client Resources, a Wilton, Conn. software company, has managed to save more than half of his salary in the past six months and has contributed the maximum amount of $5,000 to his IRA . He has been able to accumulate a large sum of savings, because he does not have any debt and his parents are footing the bill for him to live at home...

Remember the President’s repeated assurances that his bailouts and Obamacare would revive the economy? Those claims probably sound pretty hollow to the President’s one-time supporters, young adults. These eight graphs, which examine adults under the age of 25 who have moved out of their parents’ home, via PolicyMic, show that this group is suffering the worst from dwindling incomes and long-term unemployment.

Amy McGraw doesn't want us to get the wrong impression of her daughter, Rebecca Leahy. The recent graduate of Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Fla., works hard -- really hard, in school, on her dance team and beyond. But after Leahy found a summer retail job at the mall, she told her new boss she wasn't available to work on Wednesdays. "It's a different mentality from when I was her age," McGraw said. "She has nothing scheduled on Wednesdays. She wanted time to go to the beach and shopping with her friends. I was wondering if that comes from...

15 Myths Millennials Accept as Fact Last week an everyday group of anti-gun nuts called Everytown published data that claimed there have been 74 school shootings since Sandy Hook. Most of us went, “No there haven’t,” because we’ve only read about a few. The president apparently does not have access to Google, because he ran straight to the papers and bleated, “There’s no developed country on earth that would put up with this. And it happens now once a week … We should be ashamed.” He’s accidentally right. We should be ashamed of these shootings. Gang violence among black youth...

Any standards, Mary Soames led a genuinely extraordinary life. She was born in 1922, the youngest daughter of Winston Churchill. In May 1940, when her father became Prime Minister, she was just 17. As Hitler’s forces massed on the other side of the Channel, Mary was at her father’s right hand. She went with him to Quebec in 1943 to meet the U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and two years later she accompanied him to Potsdam, where she met Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin. Her death on Sunday at the age of 91 closed another link with World War II,...

A recent study by William Frey at the Brookings Institution shows that young Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 have remained stuck in place in the aftermath of the recession. Their geographical mobility rate is extraordinarily low: By one estimate, only 20.1 percent of millennials moved in the past year. And that figure includes local moves: down the street and across town. When you look at “long-distance moves” — between counties or states — it is only 7 percent, close to a historical low. “Millennials are mired down,” Frey said. They’re “very cautious about buying a home or...

“Two thirds of active missionaries are married couples. Another third are single women. The rest are single men.” This is not exactly a statistic, per se. It’s a sentiment, and sometimes a joke, expressed by mission leaders, mission recruiters, and most recently, by a bunch of twenty-something singles in my living room. It is a sentiment that reveals a striking truth about missionary work today: There are very few single men choosing to go. The real statistic is this: For AIM and other similar organizations, somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of all single missionaries are women. For every 10...

“Washington is getting so many things wrong about young people,” McCain, the host of an upcoming TV series on politics for cable channel Pivot, told TIME at the Time/People pre-White House Correspondents’ Dinner cocktail party on Friday. The district, she said, needs to start paying more attention to the demographic. Youngsters can be socially liberal and fiscally conservative, she said, but politicians such as her father, former Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R—Ariz)—can’t seem to fully grasp that. “Washington is not having a nuanced conversation about young people,” McCain says. But the host of the new late-night series hopes...

Surprise, surprise, the labor force participation rate in April for young adults between the ages of 25-29 hit a record low. Liberals continue to tout that young people are doing just fine under the Obama economy, but alas the data shows otherwise. Young people have been the hardest hit by Obama and his leftist policies. Young Americans are the ones expected to pick up the tab for the reckless spending coming from Washington while facing an increasingly tough job market. Each year Young America’s Foundation releases its Youth Misery Index (YMI), which adds together youth unemployment, average graduating student debt,...

Trust in nearly every federal government institution has fallen in the last year among young adults, according to a new poll by Harvard's Institute of Politics. The survey of 18-to-29-year-old adults released Tuesday found overall trust in the federal government stands at 20 percent, a 2-point drop since last year....

Brian Alunan has nothing to show for the 150 applications he has submitted to Sacramento area employers over the last few months. No bites, no interviews, no job. Alunan is 29, and lives with his parents. His work history is spotty. His unemployment benefits have ended. The bank is about to take his car. If every generation is supposed to be better off financially than the one that proceeded it, Sacramento “millennials” have a lot of catching up to do. Several experts said the economy is the primary culprit. Many millennials graduated from high school or college during the Great...

Republicans will nominate someone younger than her, and it won't make a difference to young people.Our old colleague Patrick Caldwell has an interesting article up at Mother Jones about the way the Hillary Clinton campaign—or whatever we can call it at this point, since it isn't actually a campaign but it isn't exactly just a bunch of independent people doing their own thing either—is going after college students. I had forgotten how idiotically hostile the Hillary '08 campaign was toward college students in Iowa, but that's just one of innumerable mistakes that one presumes she'll attempt to correct this time...

When you get what you want, you find out it’s not what you need. That is what Millennials are experiencing right now as the liberal program they voted for in 2008 and 2012 is being implemented. […] Millennials are now seeing an America they cannot thrive in. The trillion-dollar stimulus and out of control government spending ushered in by liberal politicians produced few shovel ready jobs, while leaving per capita debt at $52,948. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2013 labor force participation rate of those in their twenties has hit the lowest level on record since 1981....

Their golden years aren’t looking so golden. A mere 6 percent of the so-called millennial generation think they will receive the same level of Social Security benefits as current retirees, according to a study recently released by the Pew Research Center. It is hard to decide the appropriate reaction to this finding. On one hand, I am relieved that the vast majority of this generation understands that there is little hope Social Security will be around for their retirement — regardless of how much they pay in taxes. On the other hand, I am incredulous that 6 percent of this...

A new report suggests bigger isn’t better, when it comes to watching television programming. Deloitte found that Millennials rather watch movies and television shows on computers, smartphones, and tablets. These details were recently published in the firm’s annual Digital Democracy Survey. Those between the ages of 14 and 24 only watch TV shows on an actual television set 44 percent of the time. Thirty-two percent of the time, TV shows are consumed on a desktop or laptop. Smartphones and tablets make up another 16 percent, while gaming devices are used 8 percent. This is the first time computers, smartphones, and...