America’s Millennials Are Waking Up to a Grim Financial Future
bloomberg.com
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Married with $100k in student loans between the two of us. Her first job out of college paid $30k with no benefits. No matter, I had the money making tech degree, we'd be fine. My first job out of college was $100k, so I didn't see a problem there.
Three year later I'm facing mounting healthcare costs incurred even with top notch gold plated tech insurance. Most of my salary the last 3 years went to my landlord and the government. The remainder went to student loans and medical costs, so I don't have much in the way of savings even after earning $300k. And somehow I still owe $100k in student loans.
And my $100k tech job didn't come with retirement benefits so I don't have any retirement savings yet. It did however come with a generous stock grant. But then again, the company folded and now I don't have a job or insurance.
And now I'm a full time caregiver for my wife, with no health insurance, trying to get a job, with $100k in non-dischargable debt, looking to get on welfare, but at the same time reading about how our government wants to take even that away.
So that's what I'm doing this weekend.
Alas, all I have to offer is a measly upvote, the currency of Millennials' bright shining future.
(Full disclosure: I am an unemployed millennial as well, and too naive to understand what's keeping you from getting another job. Hence the question.)
(I spent two years working for a home care company.)
There might be some tax deduction when it's medical reasons, but I'm not sure about that.
You may want to look into deferring or forbearing your student loans [1], at least until you're back on your feet.
> my $100k tech job didn't come with retirement benefits
Next time around, consider a SEP-IRA [2]. In the meantime, contact a local NGO about subsidized healthcare, food, education and job-training and placement programs.
Also, don't be embarrassed asking for charity. When I started my first company, I took a gamble and skipped out on health insurance. A few months of sleep deprivation later, I'm in the hospital with pneumonia. Huge bill. Wrote a letter to the hospital board asking for a deferral; they wrote down the bill to pennies on the dollar.
[1] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/deferment-forbearan...
[2] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/plan-sponsor/simplified...
Politely, no, do not do that. Instead look at enrolling in an "income-driven repayment plan."[1] With this, even if your required payment is $0, you will receive credit toward the total # of payments required for your loan term.
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...
I advise couples w/ debt to rethink formal marriage because of how tax laws are structured. Same goes for those who are married; strategic divorce is a real and sometimes necessary option.
Did you mean Roth or traditional IRA instead?
Anyone who takes on debt like that is increasing the risk to their lives. Sure, if everything follows the mean - good job, good health, good relationships - people on average come out ahead after an expensive education. But the downside risk is amplified. Get sick, and there's nowhere to turn and you're stuck servicing that debt for the rest of your life.
It's a problem that crosses party lines. Both finance firms and universities have played a role in setting this system up. But millenials have to vote in numbers and advocate for making student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy -- this is the whole social point of bankruptcy law dating back centuries, to reduce crazy downside risk to individuals.
Income-based repayment plans already exist, limiting your payments to 10% of discretionary income, with full forgiveness after 20-25 years if any balance remains. "Servicing that debt for the rest of your life" is not a thing.
No doubt about it if student loans were bankruptable then it would be ripe with fraud.
Houses, cars, businesses, etc. can all be surrendered. Knowledge cannot. A degree cannot. Why should it be dischargeable if the recipient cannot discharge the benefits?
Ethics has little to do with it. The lender has money you want, and you pay them for the privilege of using that money for a while. Supply and demand.
One can't collateralize a mind aside from claiming a fraction of the attached body's output.
There is something that millennials together can do differently, though -- vote.
Millenial turnout is terribly low in the US. https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/05/16/pew2ft_16.05.13_... (So, yes, one party has made it a mission to suppress turnout; yes, Election Day is a work day, which makes it harder for working people to vote; etc. -- we can change all that, but first we have to work in the system as it is today.) And that means that boomers and the wealthy have had a much larger influence over society than young people. (The Piketty theory is that the West went through a few decades of stability after the 1970s and that made many people complacent, especially the young, allowing the wealthy and corporations to acquire power. Given the last two years, the time for complacency is ending.)
In particular, a better social safety net and a better education cost and education loan system would make for a fairer playing field for all. The only way you and I in America are going to get that is if we all vote - especially young people.
And in your particular case, the biggest travesty is the non-dischargeability of educational debt. That's a hard problem - both universities and the loan companies are at fault for lobbying for and setting up this system. But we need to fix it.
Again sorry for your current situation and I hope it looks up soon.
Point here, before voting you need figure out actual solution. Not sure if anyone you can vote for now has actual solution.
Hi, unfortunately, yes. I, like many others, wrote to him [and a few notable Democrat and Republican Senators who publicly champion(ed)] SL reform. My letter actually had supporting facts, and practical actionable policy suggestions. I heard back (directly) only from one Senator, a Republican, whose form letter was unrelated to SLs.
Though I didn't receive a direct response from anyone in Obama's administration, shortly after I'd sent my letter, the administration suggested cutting the SL interest deduction, which was polar opposite of what I'd suggested. And as you probably know, during last year's tax reform debates, the Republicans picked up, but ultimately dropped, that very same idea of removing said deduction.
There were some other policy changes that I saw effected after my letter that makes me certain that it was read and understood. Unfortunately, those changes, harmful to borrowers, were again the opposite of what I'd suggested.
Given what I am reading in Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, and have read/heard elsewhere, I'm not all that surprised.[1]
Young people will continue to be politically and financially expendable until they learn from history, organize themselves into strong blocks and directly involve themselves in the political process. Voting is merely a small part of participation. And I say that having been on the inside of the political machine.
Here's a solution: Make sure that everyone who cannot cut it in college does not go in the first place. Start by not letting people who cannot complete basic requirements graduate from high school.
This starts to turn off the money tap, instead of turning it on full blast by hooking it up to even more public funds, so it will never happen. It also prevents lots of people who can barely read from taking on debt only to drop out 2 years later after doing a few "remedial" years.
https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
Then, make college more difficult until the credentialism becomes less pointless. It is insane that we have baristas 100k in debt after being in school from age 5 to 22. There are more ways to solve that than just redirecting the debt.
This is why non-compulsory voting hasn't ever made sense to me; it effectively biases the system towards those who care the most and enables those same people to influence the system further by making it difficult enough for others that they won't bother.
When it's compulsory to vote, things like weekday voting stop happening because laws will be introduced making it illegal to prevent your employees from taking time off work to go vote, so naturally both employers and employees alike want weekend voting.
Additionally, it incentivises the government to make voting accessible, because it is unreasonable for them to enforce voting via fines etc if it's not really possible for people to vote.
When I moved to the US from Australia I heard stories from my new colleagues about people in poor neighbourhoods lining up literally all day just to maybe get to vote before the booth closed, while those in richer neighbourhoods had practically no line at their voting booths. This is not how democracy should work. Your "freedom to choose not to vote" only serves to hurt any other freedoms you may have had.
That doesn't sound unreasonable on the face of it, to be honest.
As someone who is over 50, I feel the current system is stupid. I vote from home using a mail in ballot but the ballot is several pages, often six pages long, and takes me an hour to fill out while I do research online, so someone doing it in person has to make a lot of time before or after work (polling places near their home).
There's no doubt that non-dischargeable student can be really rough for a lot of people. I'm not in insurance or anything, but it seems like if we just implemented the simplest fix, i.e. let people declare bankrupcy to forgive student loans, the math might just not pencil out to make it feasible to grant any student loans.
For instance I couldn't take out an $80k loan to start a business with instead of getting a student loan, no bank would give it to me. So there's definitely something special about student loans and the way in which they're so easy to get without needing good credit or any collateral behind them.
And if they could be forgiven by declaring bankruptcy, what would stop lots of people from doing that right after they graduate? For a lot of young people (including myself at that age), your total cumulative assets are worth approximately nothing when you graduate. And it's not like you're gonna be able to buy a house within 7 years of graduating anyway so the hit to your credit score of a bankruptcy might not be that bad.
It really doesn't seem like there's a silver bullet solution to help people finance the massive cost of college easily. What's the best solution here? Is it possible to reduce the underlying cost structure of higher education enough to make a big enough difference?
Let lenders vary interest rates by institution and major. Also, give lenders a choice: (a) loans dischargeable in court like any debt or (b) non-dischargeable loans where total payments in a calendar year are capped as a fraction of AGI.
This combination incentivises lenders to communicate employment and wage information from the labor market to students deciding where to go for school and what to study.
The median price of houses sold in the US is around $200,000. If you have a good job you can afford a house in 99% of America. And, indeed, there are more homeowners than renters.
99% of Americans live somewhere where buying a house is affordable for most people. That's cold hard facts backed up by the average house price and ownership statistics. Most Americans don't live in New York City or San Francisco.
More people own (~65% IIRC) than rent and mortgages are stupid easy to get as long as you're employed; you don't even need a sizable down payment OR a good credit score. The requirements for a FHA loan is 3.5% down and 580 credit score - that's it! There's also plenty of other government subsidized programs for buying a house, my State has one that's available to almost everyone - the income limits are stupid high, more than six figures IIRC. I know people who are in a financial mess and have no business owning a house but they do own because it's so easy to get a mortgage. My friend makes only $30,000/year working for the government and owns a house because she qualified for a mortgage.
If it was so impossible to buy a house then it wouldn't be possible for 67% of the population to own a house.
Good jobs doesn't need scare quotes.
And I don't live in the Midwest either - I live on the east coast. I have friends all over the east coast and don't live in the city where I grew up, so it's not like my experience is hyper localized.
Perhaps letting rates vary across institutions might be the simplest improvement. That would help Stanford students and make it hard to attend lower tier colleges. So we’d also need a way to advantage community colleges with a service mission. The big losers would be lower-tier, high-cost private schools and for-profits. But that’s a good thing- those are the schools that are breaking the American educational system and loading up students with low-value degrees and high debt.
None of what you cite - affordable education, a better social safety net would directly benefit the GP at this point. Indeed, he would be the one paying for it.
I don't really know how student loans work in the US, but I've heard that federal loans payements were indexed on income. For that reason, they are more akin to taxation than to a regular debt. Is that correct?
However, there is currently at least one lawsuit pending because the gov't is trying to talk its way out of providing the forgiveness. Essentially telling the group that they were mistakenly approved for the program.
Also people should read the program's fine print (in the FAQs). There is no guarantee that the program will remain or that the commitment will be honored.
The government cant really afford to forgive everyones loans. The repaid interest goes to federal programs and the principal goes to giving new loans to the younger generation.
Subsidized student loans produced many quality graduates. They also spun off reams of communication majors.
I'd actually argue part of the problem is lenders are totally immunized from the risk of their loans; if loans were priced to each institution and each major and each individual's academic record, that might pull wage and labor demand information from the labor market to undergraduate campuses.
For us the cost of living of a city and state were game-changers.
One of us was doing software/web development and another was financial accounting (CPA). This was not a small town, it was a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The farther out you move from the city, the lower the cost of living, but we had a 30-40 minute commute.
Neither of us wanted to pay for cable so we saved like $8K over a number of years skipping out on that.
I guess outlying suburbs of somewhat-but-but-wildly-bustling metros are viable as low-cost / high-employment places to live, though I'm not sure requiring long commutes that aren't well suited to mass transit is a great solution for most people.
Most people with tons of college debt that I know worked the entire time, so YMMV on that one. The people I know without debt are actually more likely to have not worked (because their parents were paying).
Another option for keeping college costs down is to start out at a community college and then transfer. With teachers there interested in teaching the material, the education can sometimes be better than entry level classes at a 4-year school.
About the student debt: That's a lot of debt. I suspect you and many other millenials were lied to when you were told that getting that much student debt is normal and necessary, when it is in fact neither. For example it takes longer to graduate when the student alternates semesters of school and work, but it does get them through (especially if the school has a strong co-op program), without nearly as severe a crushing debt load. Second, the overall benefit of an education goes way beyond the differences between schools, i.e. for many careers an inexpensive school is just as good as an expensive one. (Counterpoint: if you want to be on the Supreme Court someday, you apparently have to go to Harvard Law School...)
I confess that I'm puzzled when I hear about such high debt numbers from new grads, and the main explanation I can think of for what's different now from when I came up is that people are systematically being told that any college debt is a good investment (and loans are freely granted on that basis), when it plainly is not (and they should not be).
I hope things turn up for you soon.
2) Please see my comment below about getting yourself on an "income-based repayment plan," if you aren't already on one.
3) Believe it or not, student loan debt is dischargable, though not easily so. See [1] & [2] for a 'success'(?) story not involving a fraudulent institution. IMO this decision was the impetus for Sallie Mae (SM) restructuring itself into SM and Navient.
[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2013/05/in-showing-undue-hardship-co...
[2] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2013/05/22/1...
Yes there are predators that take advantage of others using said tool. Its been known to cause "indentured servitude". But lets not criticize the tool here. This is an issue of governance, and societal scale.
Seems like there was a huge opportunity that was foiled or just missed and this is possibly going to be the result of it.
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
It may just be an artifact of the rise of social media, although I'm not sure that the timelines really match up very well. I just want to see if anyone's really looked into it because I don't even know where to start with something like that, but it's been playing on my mind for a few months now.
A lot of them also seemed to not understand how our financial system works.
My feeling is we can't lay the problems of the modern world at the feet of individuals. There isn't a shadowy cabal intent on keep the little people down. It's just people and groups struggling for power and resources with varying degrees of a success. That's not to say there aren't collusions and conspiracies and bad doings by people with power, there most certainly are, but the fact these succeed are problems of a system. Because people are people are people and the new boss is same as the old boss and 4 legs good 2 legs better and all that jazz.
What is needed are some systemic updates. And these will happen inevitably I think.
Point is, we can't just blame bankers and politicians and corporations and call it a day. Our activity, almost to the person is responsible for the horrible outcomes. We all are trying to get a little piece of the pie and the sum total in this system is producing undesirable side effects. Housing is another prime example. It's ridiculous. Way out of wack. Unless you bought a house 30 years ago then what a great way to save for retirement and housing appreciating is fantastic!
I really think we need to back up and address some fundamentals. Housing, healthcare and education being big ones. These aren't a place for speculation and self serving bureaucracy. They are necessities of life and an advancing society. So we need to change some things about how these are run. But that means some people will no longer be able to victimize others and will lose out. But it's not all just bankers and CEOs. It's a lot of little sucker fish attached to the ecosystem as well. So it's not as easy as just getting out the guillotine which is all too common of a reaction.
You are describing a "cabal intent on keeping the little people down". The cabal works by taking steps to perpetuate systemic inequality forward.
The people involved are extremely well positioned and connected, have ridiculous amounts of material resources to call upon, and are extremely highly incentivized to keep these systemic flaws around. Thus, there is no reason to believe that systemic updates will inevitably happen.
The power elite conspiracy model in my mind is too simple and doesn't fully explain the phenomenon. Because instability isn't good for anyone so I belive it's much more complex and systemic rather than a planned conspiracy of a group of individuals.
Systemic change is inevitable I think. Sometimes it involves a hard reboot or re-install though and no one in their right mind wants that. So maybe some things in the system can be fixed to restore balance.
But first we need an accurate model of what is going on, and as loathsome as bankers and insurance CEOs might be, this isn't all their doing and they aren't the only ones preventing the fix.
I'm skeptical but regardless of whether it was intentional or just happened that does in fact seem to be what happened.
The culture war must die. Then after it's dead it must be burned, ground into fine powder, mixed with concrete, and dropped into a deep region of the ocean near a subduction zone.
Unfortunately that means everyone and I mean everyone who is culture-warring must give up and walk away. That means no more social justice warrior-ing and no more Pepe memes and alt-right tiki torch bullshit either. That means ignoring Jordan Peterson and Sam Seder. That means screw religion and atheism. That means screw the left and the right. That means... well... it kind of means everyone simultaneously loses whatever culture war they're fighting... or simultaneously wins... but you have to not care so much you don't even care about that.
I don't know. Maybe it can happen. Try this. Every time you're tempted to get mad about the "alt-right" or alternately "cultural Marxism" just stare at this graph and ask "who benefits from me worrying about this crap?"
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-imlQvrT-aFM/Ve9yY1CAV9I/AAAAAAAAM...
I will say this. As long as we are split over issues like race, gender, religion, and cultural totems the longer that graph will diverge.
I don't think its a flame war as much as a reckoning. Its like saying the Civil Rights movement was a flame war; that is how deep changes happen in a society and culture.
Specifically w.r.t the #MeToo movement, I think women demanding more compensation and better workplace environment ends up benefiting everyone (even if the movement's primary concern is with other things).
If there is one thing this horrible Presidency has accomplished, it is more political participation among Americans; a recognition of the importance of politics and of voting. That perhaps is the greatest opportunity in this generation.
The problem is that these issue cross-cut each other in almost exactly an X pattern. The majority of the working class is socially conservative, traditional, and religious, so any culture war issue tends to be a fault line that neatly divides the voting bloc that would otherwise care about economic equality.
I would like us to have racial and gender equality but unfortunately it might mean we get to all be equal and poor.
I'm always a little baffled when the struggle for economic equality gets pitted against anti-racist or feminist movements.
It is quite clear from history that racism has been employed as a tool to keep the affluent classes in power. Slavery is the most extreme example of the rich extracting wealth from their workers, but in modern times and it is also a useful wedge split the working class.
Similarly, it seems relatively easy to recognize that unequal pay and mistreatment of women suppresses the labor cost of half of the workforce.
There are obviously complex dynamics at play on both fronts, but power and wealth are being inextricable, it seems necessary to build a political movement that addresses exploitation across a range of inequalities, including economic, racial, gender, sexuality, etc.
The primary in Alabama between a pedophile and a normal person for US Senate was ridiculously close, and it was only super high turnout by African Americans that turned the tide, not young people.
I'm not saying there was never any problem with racism or anything, or that it's been invented just to create a diversion. I'm saying that the movements that existed before occupy around racism, sexism etc. instead of being about working for womens/minority rights suddenly became imbued with "fuck white male patriarchy".
During/after occupy they suddenly took this populist left turn into stoking resentment and ingroup/outgroup identification along race and gender lines. Obviously that stuff was always there but it suddenly blew up into the mainstream narrative and pushed everyone into taking a side.
There was a point in the occupy thing where "the one percent" morphed into "white males" and the narrative flipped from criticising the financial/political system, which was totally indefensible, into this flame war where working class white guys who thought they were the ones getting a raw deal are suddenly being portrayed as the bad guys by people who are basically spokespeople for the elite class- celebrities, university professors, politicians etc.. and those working class guys are all so surprised and pissed off by that they go and vote for Trump as a big fuck you to the source of the perceived betrayal, that's my take on it anyway.
That is the part of it that smells like a diversion, and now everyone is so heavily invested on either side of the culture war that there's almost no hope of them meeting again, at least for a good while and it's pretty much business as usual for the elites who are completely out of the spotlight again.
That was the whole impetus behind the adoption of "identity politics" by a corrupt Democratic party establishment who had completely sold out their traditional base of working people to Wall Street. Their continued push to make society's problems all about "identity" instead of economic inequality (You can still hear the cries of "race not class!") was a strategy deliberately employed by the scions of the Democratic party firmly entrenched in the ruling class. Have no doubt that they are out in the Hamptons right now, rubbing shoulders with billionares and oligarchs crying about racism and 54 genders while countless millions of Americans are mired in poverty, and hundreds of millions more are one medical emergency or minor crisis away from homelessness. Those at the DNC and the Center for American Progress and a dozen other neo-liberal think tanks collecting millions a year to maintain the economic status-quo have everything to gain and nothing to lose by continuing to polarize people based on "identity" in an effort to distract them from the profound structucal problems in our economy and our society. Unless and until people wake up and eject these grifters from the halls of power the Democratic party is destined to look very much like the Republican party, just peddling a different brand of bigoted idiocy to keep poor people from supporting their economic interests.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-dem...
That seems to be the case with pretty much every major issue we're facing right now. The student loan bubble, the Republican tax cut and repeal of Wall Street regulations, global warming, education, the decimation of the nation's worldwide standing, the obesity crisis ...
Collectively, we have no attention span. We get scared about something, then think to ourselves "well, somebody has always solved the big problems in the past. I'm sure somebody will solve this one, too," and go back to voting for someone on The Voice instead of someone in the Senate.
2016 voter turnout amongst millennials was 49% versus 61% for the population [1]. It's not surprising that old-guard industries are being subsidized and Social Security and Medicare expanded while education subsidies and entry-level public sector job openings fall.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-...
Newsroom series had a nice description for that. There was a disorganised mass of people with a very vague idea of who they wanted to change and why. With no clear goals, no actual representative from the other side that is held responsible for progress, etc. nothing could really happen. (Unless it turned into actual uprising)
I don't think it's just us, though it probably disproportionately is. What wealth small and medium towns had has moved to cities, you just won't have a good job unless you move to the city.
Something about it all seems so sinister. Not everyone can be an engineer or a doctor. If society is to function people need to be able to live a reasonable life just being mildly productive.
I have friends in New York's service industry (bartenders, waiters, et cetera). Breaking in was tough. But once they established themselves, they began doing quite well.
Economised with roommates; diligently saved; kept a tight budget and continuously applied to the affordable housing lotteries.
Can't sympathize with their political views but I do sympathize with wanting to blow the system up and try something different. Things are going to go south real fast if/when the same trend of disappearing jobs starts happening in cities too.
You shouldn't. They have the choice to pack up and find better jobs and opportunities. Not all city jobs are doctors and engineers; in fact the fastest growing job is wind turbine technicians.
America has been through this before; the industrial revolution and then the Service sector industry led to mass migration from rural to Urban areas. And most younger Americans from smaller towns do end up doing just that.
I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone that can condone; nigh constantly encourage the kind of cruelty that we see today from the GOP.
Believe me, this is why I can't speak with some family/friends from back home.
But packing up and moving doesn't boil down to will, cards are stacked against you when you live in a rural area with few opportunities (same is true for high crime neighborhoods in cities).
It took me years to escape and it boiled down to getting lucky that I knew someone who left for a medium-sized city and was able to hitch a ride as a temporary roommate, got started waiting tables and taught myself programming at night/on weekends.
It's incredibly difficuly to move to a city: unless you are something amazing, employers want local candidates. Landlords want you to have a job before giving you a lease. It's an awful chicken/egg problem that is insurmountable to most.
I'm not discounting the difficulties and very real hardships faced by these people. But I do want to point out that the United States offers a lot of opportunities for economic growth and well being, much more than you can find in most other countries. To not make use of that just sounds too stupid to me.
You really can't just keep waiting in your small town and expect things to magically improve. Either find a way to make things work or move on. Or vote for constructive policies. Don't fucking put a sex offender in the Oval Office.
One of my criticisms of neoliberal economics/politics is it doesn't consider stable meaningful jobs that your can support a family on as a necessary output of the economic system.
Very likely this is what stakeholder-profits-at-all-costs leads to.
I am definitely in that group. If i can have a decent living on social welfare programs then i definitely would not work. Working sucks. I just hate the idea of working or satisfying customer's needs because it represents a master/slave type relationship.
Introduce land value tax.
In the countries using it, stop the mandatory Ponzi scheme retirement pyramid where young people are forced to pay a sizeable part of their paycheck while having no hope of receiving any in 30-40 years - that's straight up, time-delayed stealing.
Close the tax gaps used by corporations.
Provide free healthcare so people don't get ruined by medical emergencies.
Stop the student loan madness, provide free university education.
Restrict mortgage lending - it makes the property prices baloon in the long run and encourages housing bubbles.
Most importantly, start treating renewable energy and emissions seriously because we are destroying this planet with a speed with which we probably won't have to worry about economy after a few more generations.
Unfortunately, all of those would require enormous political changes and are impossible to implement.
Because our generation doesn't vote [1].
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-...
I wonder how much of turnout downturn is just rational: If half my city didn’t vote it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference for the last national election. Probably wouldn’t have mattered if the whole city didn’t vote, because I live in coastal California.
139 million Americans voted in 2016's general election [1]. Of that, 34 million were millennials, or 49% of millennial eligible voters [2].
69% of Boomers voted [2]. If a similar fraction of millennials voted, we'd have had 48 million votes [a]. That would bring our share of the vote to 31% [b], the same as boomers [c].
Geographic effects act on the margins. Bringing 14 million additional voters to the polls will change outcomes and change legislative priorities regardless of how they are distributed.
[1] http://www.electproject.org/2016g
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/31/millennials-...
[a] (34 x 10^6 / 0.49) 0.69*
[b] (48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6)/(48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6 + 139 x 10^6)
[c] 48.1 x 10^6 / (48 x 10^6 - 34 x 10^6 + 139 x 10^6)
Also the united states already has a large land value tax called property tax. It helps to fund local governments.
What does renewable energy have to do with the bleak finances of a generation?
Do you really believe that your mother/grandmother is the enemy here? My belief is that who you're actually imagining when you read this article is some fat-cat corporate executive in a suit and tie who is old enough to reap the largess of Reagonomics. They happen to be 60+, but in actuality, the distinguishing feature is that they're rich.
My dad is a retired firefighter and Vietnam vet, and my mom is a executive admin. These are two people who should not be blamed for the cards the youth have been dealt.
It's the Elite. The Controlling Class. Whatever you want to call it, they enacted policies some decades ago to benefit only them, and now they're reaping those rewards at a staggering pace. And they're quite happy that you have found someone else to blame besides them.
Even the "Top 1% vs Us 99%ers" is the same kind of thing. They're happy your anger is centered at plastic surgeons and defense attorneys. The real wealth is in the 0.01%, the people who don't have to work (and haven't for generations) and want to keep it that way.
As long as you are blaming someone else, they're safe and happy to keep pulling the strings on society. But I'm not going to take a cop-out excuse of blaming the grandmother down the street who has been living in the same 1800 sq ft home she bought with her husband and 3 kids in the 70s and hasn't ever update the decor in her kitchen.
Seems most of us here already found the answer: learn something about the fastest growing sector of the economy and participate in the future instead of lamenting the present.
If you're waiting for government action to create a better distribution of wealth in the only developed country where poor people actually vote against a public safety net you're going to be disappointed.
It's just not going to happen politically in the US for decades so your only option is to play ball in the system as it is now and vote in the meantime.
That's so callous. Would you say the same if computers had turned out a dud, a fringe curiosity nothing more? If the fastest growing sector of the economy had instead turned out to be MMA cage fighting? Or perhaps you're physically inclined; imagine whatever it is you would be vigourously annoyed doing. Cobra wrestling. No-chute skydiving with plane re-entry.
I really wonder about those parallel universes. About what the parallel you would have said, there, to the elite in their cobra wrestling ivory tower, lamenting those lazy plebs. They should just man up and start hitting the serpentine goldmine!
Or was it, like, a reverse psychology point, where precisely by explicitly pointing out the absurdity of the only solution, you realise just how untenable our current predicament is?
Complaining that you don't like how everything is changing into Cobra wrestling won't change the fact that it's happening.
Even if you're physically not suited to cobra wrestling, there would many many tertiary jobs and functions needed to support that growing sector you could enter. Cobra wrestling promoter. Cobra wrestling trainer. Cobra wrestling gym manager. Cobra wrestling photographer. Cobra wrestling filmographer. Cobra wrestling transport.
What would be your better solution for people? Try to get government to artificially support the no-longer needed computer workers so they can still pretend they make money from working on computers?
You want free universal Healthcare? Build a system that does that.
Free university? Build it.
Solution to global warming? Solve it by inventing new technology.
Be the change you want to see in the world and dont let anyone tell you that you cant do it because history is filled with the tales of those who have done what was once thought of as impossible.
I am yet to understand why US millennials have all these troubles, or is it just perceived by them as such? Because frankly, comparatively speaking food is not expensive in the US. Even on minimum wage you can eat the best, healthy food there is. Infrastructure is just a whole country Disneyland. Opportunities are higher than all of human history including the present combined. Schooling is free. You can afford a good car for minimal monthly payments. You get pure drinking water, and more importantly unlike the third world countries, you get to breathe the purest air possible. Its not hard to exercise and maintain good health either.
Gaining any skill or knowledge has never been more easier, than it is today.
I understand if you had a unfortunate health complication beyond your control, or you are disabled at birth. But for healthy people, there isn't much you can complain about.
Sorry for sounding rude here. This sounds a lot more like decadence, than any real problem.
The US is a huge country; living in it for 4 years for work — unless that work is, I dunno, leading a large cross-regional socioeconomic study — will leave you knowing pretty close to nothing about it related to the issues you discuss.
> I am yet to understand why US millennials have all these troubles
Because radical shifts in US tax policy over the past several decades have changed the arc of financial prospects for the non-elite much faster than cultural expectations have adapted.
> Even on minimum wage you can eat the best, healthy food there is
No, you can't. On minimum wage you can't even afford minimal (as in, not so substandard as to be condemned and illegal for habitation) shelter in much of the country, much less shelter + “the best, healthy” unprepared food + food storage and prep equipment, or shelter + “the best, healthy” prepared food.
> Infrastructure is just a whole country Disneyland.
It's really not, you need to see more of the country if you think it is. (Unless by “Disneyland” you mean “glitzy facade that's hollow underneath”, which is closer to true, but even there much of the country lacks even the facade.)
> Opportunities are higher than all of human history including the present combined.
That's not even abstractly possible, much less true.
> Schooling is free.
But often absymally bad.
> You can afford a good car for minimal monthly payments.
Median used car price in the US is just under $20,000; median auto loan interest is 4.20% (for used cars probably higher, because the most credit-worthy people are more likely to buy new cars.) On a 60 month loan with zero down, that's 50+ hours at federal minimum wage to make the monthly payment.
> You get pure drinking water,
No, you don't, in many cases, though awareness of this (except for Flint, MI, which is not unique in its toxic lead levels though perhaps unique in the manner by which that occurred) is poor.
My point is US citizens are still well off than all of humanity together(Though I give it to you, certain parts of Europe are equal if not better). Rice, Lentils, Meat and Vegetables are not expensive in the US. Learning to cook today is getting a smart phone, and a having an internet connection. Running doesn't take much money to do. So you can eat healthy and live healthy. Education is bad in some places and yet way better than what you get in other countries.
Learning how to save or personal finance is basically knowing basic arithmetic.
And yes, a nation wide freeway system is great transit infrastructure. Nissan Versa is cheap. And learning anything today is the cost of internet bandwidth.
And US is still largely a very free country. Where there are tons of opportunities for anyone who wants to show up and try.
Most of what I'm writing is bootstrap level resources you need to start, And these are not hard to do with wages delivering Pizzas at dominoes.
It largely feels like Millennials in US need some reality check. If you can't succeed in a country as awesome as the US. Chances are you won't survive weeks in other countries.
The same 2017 survey found 27 percent skipping medical treatments because they can’t afford them.
In the end, I suspect that medical costs driven to astronomical levels by retirees is what will do the most financial damage to millennials.
Provides ripe opportunity for jacking up health care costs on age 50+ ailments/treatments.
None of them allow private companies to dictate drug and procedure prices.
The US dedicates 50% more of it's GDP to healthcare than Japan does, despite having more favorable demographics for need of services by age. (see fig 2 [1])
[1] https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Country-Note-JAPAN-O...
Where is there a single instance of a working healthcare system with fully deregulated healthcare? The free market solution is not a panacea for all kinds for all markets - particularly ones where there are inherent limiting information and choice constraints.
Of the R&D budgets spent by private companies, much of it is spent on patent extending repackaging exercises instead of fundamental research.
And the OP still hasn't named one nation with fully deregulated healthcare while there are 30-40 OECD nations running much better performing healthcare systems with properly placed gov't controls while the US without is a complete outlier in the data.
I don't want to be caustic, but the national data say so much more than hopes for a free market solution in the area of healthcare.
Until millennials start voting. At that point, we'll probably see Social Security and Medicare funds re-purposed for a universal basic income.
My friends who didn't get PTSD in the war spent the first 8 years of our career in a recession so when the market grew had no money in the market to capitalize on that. And even as a healthy person with good health care and six figures in my bank I worry I can get wiped out by a medical emergency.
I think it's more like: other people are finally realizing what millennials have been living with their entire adult life so far.
See section 2, the free banking era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
With no central bank, our economy experienced regular depressions (worse than recessions--but lots of those too) and panics with unemployment fluctuating up to 20% during each of those times.
Source? Didn’t QE end a while ago?
As someone in my 50's I've come to look at my remaining working years as an asset. The central banks did a bang up job of devaluing that.
Us has begun to slowly ease of Quantitative easing by increasing the interest rate. Other central banks are still using QE.
Yes, QE plus low interest rates inflate the value of risk assets like equities and real estate. However, the alternative was stagnation and high unemployment and low growth for decades.
Does it suck for the generation stuck in the middle who hasn't accumulated enough to own any risk assets? Yes. However it's better than the alternative.
We hammer on scholarship preparation, hard. Our college boy works paid internships each summer. The kids are all in band, good for small scholarships at little effort.
We are fine so far. Good luck to others on this path. Avoid the debt, it can be one.
There’s probably no exact trend. But that golden eras are easier to identify.
Seriously, the current age feels like the mid 80s. If that holds true, the millenials will be fine.
If people would stop and make an honest assessment of their situation, why they're not where they want to be, commit to grinding until they get there, and actually DO IT...things would be better.
Unfortunately it's become fashionable to point fingers, assign blame, and make a ruckus about being 'oppressed'. That may get you more Twitter followers, but it won't lead to economic betterment.
I'm not sure where I read this, but a quote that really resonates with me as a millennial who went out and found / fought for nearly all their opportunities "I love being a millennial, because it's so easy to be better than most of my generation".
I’m all for meritocracy. But only if the game is fair.
Yes, we have some issues we need to sort out - NIMBYs and zoning laws tamping down on new housing supply in cities, and a broken healthcare market are the largest ones. But it's dangerous to forget that the system we have is overall overwhelmingly better for most people than what came before the 1900s, let alone before the 1400s.
I know some people who have followed their dreams and it has led them straight into the poor house doing years of unpaid internships all for a job that is rare, but still only one or two steps above minimum wage.
But I do think there's an attitude and professionalism problem. The term "funemployed", the way beards, tattoos, and casual drug use are coming back in style. The oversharing. And the fact that somehow the generation that grew up with computers still has way too many people on the wrong side of the digital divide.
Your generation is not pathetic. Your generation has had the deck well stacked against you economically before you were born.
Good luck blaming others for your problems...
Poor you.
For most people, salary is completely decorrelated from how hard they work. It's quite depressing, actually.
The canonical example would be someone who mined a bit of Bitcoin in 2010 and archived it and forgot about it for six or seven years. That's an extreme one but to varying degrees the whole economy seems to look like that.
I think this is a problem because it completely decouples reward from sustained focus and planning. If you pick something of value and apply yourself to it, chances are it will take too long and you'll miss the window. You have to be there before there is any rational reason to think something will be valuable, otherwise you miss out to the people who randomly happened to be standing there when money fell on them.
As such it ends up reducing to a lotto or a bad MMORPG where you run around and loot kind of randomly materializes here and there.
The roles that do require sustained focus and rational planning are careers, and now you're in the early 21st century real estate hyperinflation trap. Most of the career jobs that pay well are in places where the rent or mortgage costs are so high you'll never accumulate wealth, and most of the places with affordable housing are places where there are no good upwardly mobile jobs. If you follow a rational career path your choice is between two different ways of going nowhere.
The only way to get ahead is to win one of those random hustle lotteries and vault out ahead of real estate's unstoppable inflation. (Certain other necessities like tuition and health care are inflating without bound too, but I picked on real estate for being the worst offender.)
Are you aware that the ratio between average house cost and the median hourly wage of a 20-something worker is an order of magnitude higher for Millenials than it was for people in the seventies? Meaning, essentially, that you have to work ten times as much to get the same result? No, and for all you know Millenials are working twice and hard as you were, and then you take the 5x shortfall as proof that they're just pointing fingers.
It wouldn't budge much: when you leave big cities, houses get a lot cheaper, but work quickly dries up too, so you're right back where you started. It's the nature of the economy at present that the cities are where the jobs there; that's why everyone keeps moving in despite the skyrocketing rent.
You also need generational support; in my case my parents worked crazy hard to get me into schools where I could work hard and roll the dice. This snowballs quickly.
Deriding people who are unemployed and have inescapable debt as caring about Twitter followers ignores the real dispair facing multiple generations of Americans who worked very hard, got a degree, and were rewarded with a hostile marketplace that didn’t need their labour. They got a raw deal, Netflix and cheap opiates for expensive healthcare and poor pay.
If your parents were wealthy or middle class and you are middle class, nobody judges you.
But if your parents were poor, and you are poor as an adult, that's somehow a moral failing, despite the fact that your level of economic mobility was identical to your middle-class peer above.
Nobody scolds someone making 60K/year for not 10x-ing their income, regardless of the opportunities they were given.
Ask your colleagues around about what their parents are doing, and we’ll talk about accessible potential again, or most likely you’ll see horrible inequality.
Hear Hear.
I have to admit, I'm blessed. Good job with good co-workers. Amazing wife. Great family/church/community. Yet, I really need to do this. I'm not where i should be, and it's do to my own laziness/procrastination/etc. It's too easy to blame someone else for my own shortcomings.
PS - Here is a related quote I've been reflecting on recently about my habit of procrastination. So far, it's been quite helpful.
"If I'm honest about it, the actions I've engaged in today satisfy my short-term pleasures rather than my long-term goals."
I'm not decided on where I sit on basic income yet, on the one hand, it might become a necessity as jobs vanish, but on the other hand, it consolidates a lot of power into a benevolent state, one which has not shown it's ability to stay benevolent.
My issue is more that I'd be putting a lot of trust in the government to provide for me for (avg lifespan - X) years of being a net drain on the system.
Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice I'll get to make though. Taking it to the cynical conclusion, I'd be better off with living a few years of living off BI before the government killbots come compared to working those same years and then getting killbotted.
Your imagination is lacking.
We aren't there yet, but something like basic income is an inevitable necessity if automation really takes off.
In the past, automation created more jobs that it destroyed. Horse whip and buggy manufacturers went out of business because of the automobile, but the automobile created tremendous opportunity, for example.
But we are closely approaching the point where additional automation destroys more jobs than it creates, if we aren't there already. There's a McDonalds near my house that has replaced a large number of their workers with computer screens. I really don't think there's anywhere else for those former employees to go, and I don't think touch screens at McDonalds is going to have the kind of civilization-expanding power as the internal combustion engine.
I know it's a bit cliche to ask what we will do when the robots take our jobs, but ... what we will do when the robots take our jobs. There are a lot of people whose only skills can be trivially mechanized. How are we going to take care of them? And are we going to take care of them before their misery sparks some kind of a culture-wide uprising?
Same in college, 18-21 year old children. And now these same children look desperately for others to blame, while in reality we have a growing proportion of incompetent workers performing increasingly meaningless tasks, walled away behind miles of red tape and a Goliath of bureaucracy.
American popular culture places little value on education and self-improvement. The windfall that was WWII is dwindling, while other nations take steps to optimize the very parts of their labor pipeline that we in the U.S. neglect.
Millennials are waking up to a decline that they are ill-equipped to reverse. Twitter, Facebook, et al. are only hastening the degradation of western culture, accelerating an existing, emergent glamorization of shallow materialism over knowledgeability and competence.
The free market is built on ends - singular goods and services. But the living world is not. What dies or is consumed today feeds the survivors for tomorrow. A sparrow could never be reimbursed by a hawk for its life. But eventually the hawks raw materials rejoin the worlds supply and plays its part in supplying for more life. Life on earth takes energy from the sun or earth, ultimately - that’s the “end” that fuels all life. Humanity does itself the greatest disservice in defining goods and services as ends in themselves. Humanity ought to “close the loop” - find a way to survive and thrive through redefining how humanity works such that it obeys that the only end that the earth actually receives is energy from the sun or earth.
https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
Students aren't leaving high school, nevermind college, with the skills that should be expected of them. A great dumbing down is in effect because we do not want to hurt feelings and want everyone to graduate, move on to the next level, etc.