Hacker News Reader

What future? What is there to be excited about? Can't actually spend money at the federal and state level aside from tax cuts and the military without being met with resistance and a subset of politicians and economists screaming bloody murder about super dooper hyper inflation that's totally going to happen any day now we promise (but don't worry about the last 40 years of us saying it, this time we're sure we're correct).

We have low interest rates now. We had low interest rates in 08 through the early 10's too but the ~i n f l a t i o n~ boogyman and super serious debt hawks said we couldn't do it, all while passing tax cuts and giving the military essentially unlimited money, while continuing to erode our rights.

American infrastructure is beyond saving and will require new deal levels of spending to even get it to a shape resembling the amount of wealth this country has, and we are never going to do it because we live in an oligarchic state and the billionaires are fine, so why do we need to do anything more?

False optimism about the future from older generations is nothing new - been happening for years now

sorry but typically in the past older generations have been optimistic about the future and younger generations have been pessimistic. That is a a common phenomenon observed by social scientists which is that people in their twenties are a lot more pessimistic than people in their 40s and 50s.

Let's be clear: globally the world is much better off than it has ever been and therefore the optimists were correct. Even in the US I remember how in the early '90s the Gen xers were always complaining about how the future was going to be f*. They were wrong too.

based on historical trends you are most likely wrong as well.

I mean listen to yourself. you are talking about generations of false optimism and yet the world and even this country has a much higher standard of living than it has ever had.

If the world is better overall it's due to technological advancement, not due to governance. Our current president is Trump, an idiot who completely mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic, lied about how well he was handling it, refuses to be televised wearing a mask while mask-shaming others, and spends his time peddling conspiracy theories on Twitter, and now threatening to shut down the platform for fact-checking his blatant disinformation. We have probably the worst president to ever disgrace the office next to Andrew Jackson, so yea people are pessimistic.

Also this is the first time in our history that the youth are expected to make less than their parents. The older generation stripped away pension plans, affordable university, affordable healthcare, job stability - basically everything that was working well, and sold their kids off into student loan debt.

I agree that Trump sucks. Rhetorically, worst president. But as policies and outcomes go, there have been worse. Hoover? How about the fact that we banned alcohol for over a decade? Bush started a ruinous war on false pretenses. FDR incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps. LBJ and Vietnam. What about the chain of corporate owned presidents that allowed, and encouraged, outsourcing of manufacturing? That certainly hurt coronavirus response. SK and China were able to make their own PPE. US factories have dwindled over decades. Trump didn't create that mess. Clinton and Newt Gingrich did in a bipartisan sell out of the working class.

Read a history book and gain some perspective. You lack it.

By the way, you left out affordable housing. That is a huge generational theft, and is the worst in areas like California, where baby boomers used zoning laws to prevent an adequate supply of new housing from being built.

The different is that in the 90s, there was no clear evidence for pessimism about the future. The same is not true now.

Standard of living for most Americans is actually bad right now - trillions of student loan, no prospect of home ownership, no jobs, extreme income interest, weak authoritian governments,and let me know even start of climate change.

But hey, we have a new iPhone so I guess it's all fine.

Actually the central banks are very good at causing inflation. The problem is that the only way to get access to central bank money is through a mortgage or a student loan. Corporations are not in need of financing beyond surviving the current lock down. So what we get to see is inflation in higher education and house prices.

If you want to borrow money from a bank as a 26 year old startup founder you are probably getting a bad deal with high interest rates. You're not seeing the benefit of the negative interest rates. Going from a 13% interest rate to 10% isn't going to magically make your startup profitable.

Basically the policies have an effect but they are completely inaccessible for those who actually need them. Because of the selective access the stimulus is actually causing market distortions that hurt those who don't have access to the stimulus.

> it certainly would be great to see young Americans be more excited about the future and I think some big investment

I don't think it's the fault of young Americans. It's more the fault of those in charge. We haven't been investing in young Americans like we did in the post WWII era. It's no wonder they're pessimistic given high amounts of student debt and political rulers that are basically trying to milk all the money out of the masses to enrich the themselves and their wealthy friends.

> I think some big investment in infrastructure could be a way to make that happen

I'm curious what infrastructure you think would excite young Americans. With the exception of changing energy generation from fossil fuels to renewables, I can't think of a single thing that I could generalize young Americans caring about, much less be excited about.

Not saying that there aren't people like yourself and others that get excited about infrastructure, but is there anything that would excite more than just a tiny subset of us nerds that care about such things?

> Anecdotally, the largest problem I think we have is that there are vast amounts of people who feel like victims and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated.

I wholeheartedly agree that many feel this way, but how does getting excited about infrastructure projects address this? The root cause of people feeling this way is because they are constantly being told by the MSM and social media that they should feel this way.

I'm a "young"-ish American (lower end of millenial), and the growth of public transit in my local city was immensely exciting. New trains and bus routes were probably a huge factor in me staying where I'm at, and I feel more engaged in local politics than anything happening on the national stage.

Contrast that with some of the underfunded, addiction-riddled states where nothing new has been built since the 1960s...I mean, I'm going crazy just from staying inside for the last couple months. I couldn't imagine what it'd be like if I was born in and terminally stuck in a town that looked exactly the same for entirety of my life. That's incredibly depressing and demotivating.

I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. My suburb still 30 years later still looks exactly the same, just with less local businesses and more big chains, and more homeless people. There is still no viable public transportation accessible without a car. Needless to say I left a long time ago (to NYC, where I saw firsthand the subway get worse and worse every year and is currently in a dire state).

I ended up leaving the U.S, and was surprised to learn that public transportation and not needing a car is pretty much standard in the rest of the world.

> Anecdotally, the largest problem I think we have is that there are vast amounts of people who feel like victims and just about everyone feels like they are under attack or have been violated.

its easy to feel that way when the news media from fox (especially) to cnn is pumping that stuff out daily as they almost seemingly yell at you from the screen...