<p>Yep, when resources get scarce, species tend to turn on themselves.</p>
<p>And, I can say that the Ron Paul craze on campuses had a lot to do with the appeal of the Jefforsonian element to governing. “Government is best which governs (read: taxes, tells us what to do in our bedroom, what to eat, etc.) least.”</p>
<p>We shall see how it turns out.</p>
<p>BC, that’s not going to work the way it does with economic questions. We are talking pure psychology here, and the kids are angry, and not entirely wrong to be angry, either. They don’t need to also be condescended to, as if, “Hey, if you weren’t so entitled, you’d have a job already!” Anymore than boomers need to be told, “You should have saved more money and not relied on the government to bail you out.”</p>
<p>It goes both ways, and it is counterproductive. And the kids have more votes.</p>
<p>Poetgrl is right about debt - while I can change public debt (or try to) on her behalf by my vote, I can do less about private debt. Today’s cashless society encourages credit card debt. </p>
<p>Student loans are part of where we probably pushed debt onto our kids. I graduated deep in the late 70’s recession in Seattle…when the billboard read “will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?”. In my memory, almost all of my classmates went to college. Last year I chanced upon my high school graduation program…more than a third of my class started at CC, including many who are now CPA, lawyers, engineers, etc. We were a pretty fancy-pants high school in the “best” district.
I don’t remember anybody who had debt as an undergrad. You went where you could afford to go.
Maybe more parents should be taking that line and places like CC should be pushing it.</p>
<p>I remember that sign well, dragonmom. I graduated just a little later then you, but I was too oblivious to notice a recession (except when my parents got laid of by Boeing and we went on food stamps, hard not to notice that). Most of my friends went to college, but not all my classmates. Same as you, no debt, lots of CC and UW, though we were in the middle class section of what was probably a pretty crummy district. Funny how most of us seemed to do pretty well, despite no money, a pathetic high school education, and cc. I wouldn’t want to hang with this generations high schoolers, I couldn’t keep up. They are far smarter and harder working (at least at school work) than any of us were.</p>
<p>Any boomer who seriously thinks they dealt with major economic hardship in the 70s or 80s is simply not looking at statistics. This is the greatest economic crisis since the great depression, but this time around we don’t have an abundance of social services or a major war to get us out of the hole (not that I’m for that!). </p>
<p>I urge anyone who criticizes millennials for complaining about the economy to first examine unemployment statistics, minimum wage, and the average cost of living in the US (and particularly in cities). Then compare that to the same statistics from when you were 20-25. In 1978, when my own mother was 22, minimum wage was $2.65, equivalent to $9.32 today. Federal minimum wage in 2012? $7.25. But what’s even stranger is that many professional jobs requiring bachelor’s or even master’s degrees only pay $10/hour. That is absolutely absurd, especially as the cost of living has risen exorbitantly.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why anyone wants to sit around yelling “lazy” at kids these days. We are some of the hardest working people the US has ever seen, and we have clearly been hit with a major crisis. I’m not sitting around blaming the boomers really. I work hard and am struggling to do my best to get by. So why do you want to lay blame on us?</p>
<p>I had college debt. Not a lot and it was only 1% for 10 years which I paid off in a few months. My sister had quite a bit more debt and she kept playing this game where she stopped paying, then when they yelled and screamed, made a few payments and stopped.</p>
<p>I don’t know about my other sisters.</p>
<p>Not everyone had it easy financially in college.</p>
<p>I worked 18 hours/week for spending money.</p>
<p>Others that I’ve spoken to at work worked full-time jobs while going to college. I only did this for a few semesters and figured that it wasn’t a good way to maintain my health.</p>
<p>I will have to ask my mother about that because she was actually there. She has told me the stories of economic deprivation in the past.</p>
<p>My wife was poor growing up in a third-world country. How do you think that compares to living in the US? Are times tough? Certainly. But they have been tough before and people do what they have to do to survive the hard times.</p>
<p>The good times after WWII were an anomaly because the rest of the world had their industrial base crippled or lost vast numbers of their productive citizens. The US dominated because we still had our industrial capacity intact - perfect for making goods for export and domestic use. Now we have to compete in a global marketplace where foreigners are willing to work very, very hard for a fraction of what we traditionally paid here.</p>
<p>That is a very, very hard problem to solve.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure about that considering it was still possible…though harder in the '70’s and '80s for working-class/lower-middle class students to work their way through colleges to defray most/all of their undergrad expenses with little/no help from the parents…especially if they received FA/scholarships. Knew some older cousins and their working-class friends who successfully pulled it off…even while attending private colleges like Tufts. </p>
<p>Don’t know of many part-time/summer jobs nowadays which would enable undergrads to do that nowadays…even if they are attending their in-state publics. And that’s assuming they can even find part-time/summer jobs considering the shortage of such jobs among friends/acquaintances who are current/recent college grads over the last few years. </p>
<p>Having such a job was already an exception to the rule during my college years in the mid-late '90s…even if one attended in-state publics in my home state. If anything, the only kids I knew who were putting themselves 100% through in-state public colleges without parental support and without FA/scholarships due to parental income/budget cuts were those who extended their undergrad time to 5-7+ years because they had to go part-time/take semesters off to earn enough for college and to minimize post-graduation debt. </p>
<p>Everyone who graduated within 4-5 years had a reasonable level of parental financial support and/or were the lucky few with high FA/scholarship money given budget cut issues already present. </p>
<p>And yes, we Gen Xers heard the same canard from the older generations about how they “worked their way through college” and ignoring the fact that college tuition rates…especially in-state publics made that much more doable back then than the '90s…especially considering with some of the older generation who were undergrads in the '50s/‘60s…some in-state publics were practically/completely free as several teachers, classmates’ parents, and some Profs recounted. Such canards are even more absurd nowadays considering the high tuition prices of even many in-state publics. </p>
<p>Such “get off my lawn” moments aren’t only unhelpful…but is also quite unseemly of those in the older generations IMHO…especially as one of many who doesn’t fit the Gen X “slacker” stereotype dreamed up by the older generations and IME…the vast majority of millennials/recent college grads I’ve known aren’t the older generation’s imagined “Me generation” want everything catered to them…</p>
<p>Part of the issue, honied, is that most everyone in earlier generations have hardship stories that will put your generations troubles to shame. The standard of living has gone up so much, expectations are higher. I doubt there are many new college graduates who are now living anything like what us and our parents, and their parents lived with. So when we see people talking about their hardships (while still dining out, going to bars, movies, talking on their cell, with their laptops)…well, you see the point. Not that I’m referring to you, because obviously I don’t know you.</p>
<p>My kids have had it so easy financially, it’s ridiculous. I hope they could cope if things got tough. But the way we lived as kids? No heat, no air conditioning, a house full of construction, 4 people taking baths in the same water, my parents giving up their cheap wine because of cost. Bus, bikes, running, a $200 falling apart car that I was so grateful for, no going out to dinner, never a vacation trip. And this was a lower middle class family, not poor. It is a completely different lifestyle, and when we remember how we and our parents struggled, it’s hard to relate. Funny, I never realized how deprived I was, not really. And now I’m highly paid, with plenty of savings…but after paying for college and taxes, I still feel broke.</p>
<p>I wonder what the unemployment rates would be if they could factor in unemployment insurance. When people are able to collect unemployment for years, instead of just six months, they are far less inclined to seek employment in jobs that are less desirable/lesser paying. Of course, when the money runs out, people are far more willing to do whatever work they can find. So I wonder how they could adjust for that.</p>
<p>I put myself through college and graduated with no debt.</p>
<p>Kids can’t do that, today, and right now we are talking about recent graduates of college.</p>
<p>They aren’t graduating into the same set of circumstances we did. While we all experienced hardship, obviously, and drove horrendous rattle-trap cars, gas prices were nothing like they are, today, for one thing. This is just crippling when you are on a stuck budget. </p>
<p>The point is, pointing at the younger generation and saying, “You guys are a bunch of entitled swine! You could have a job if you were just willing to walk to Fargo,” might be true, in essence, but has very little to do with what happened when the boomers were younger.</p>
<p>What the kids, today, face, is much more akin to what the kids in Europe face, except they also have debt that those kids don’t have. We have an abysmal GDP, we are being told 8% unemployment (the worst it got in the 80’s was 83 and 84, and it only lasted for 2 years!)is the new “normal.” Those on this board all had college degrees, and not a very large percentage had those college degrees back then.</p>
<p>What college grads face today is nothing like what college grads faced when they were a much, much smaller percentage of the population. Let’s not leave that out. Most of the posters here faced so much less competition, just by virtue of the fact that there were so many fewer college grads.</p>
<p>The factors are bigger than are being supposed by anyone who thinks these kids are lazy. Just the sheer volume of them shows they are, most certainly, not.</p>
<p>Kidding, kind of. The economy certainly ain’t much better than it was 3.5 years ago but I know the blame doesn’t rest entirely on the president (hell there’s not much he can directly do).</p>
<p>I would, however, like to personally thank every boomer who decided to ruin this country’s economy and screw over an entire generation or two (because you damn well know this is gonna have a ripple effect that goes on to the next gen).</p>
<p>Depends on the individual within a given generation and what their situation was during their formative years. </p>
<p>Interestingly…even though my parents grew up in China during the Japanese invasion and a Chinese civil war in the '30s and '40s and recounted those stories for us “young’uns”, they’d never meant nor would they approve of using them to show up the younger generation to the extent you and some other commenters here seem to be inclined towards. </p>
<p>In fact, all the older relatives…even the ones who were inclined to slag on the young’uns for “having it so easy” were actually horrified and even angry when they visited my first apartment and found how I made my budget. </p>
<p>Their first words were along the lines of “We didn’t go through all this trouble of immigrating to the US, enabling you to be born/raised in the US, and having you graduate from college(which neither they nor my parents paid for) to be living such a parsimonious existence.” They didn’t like the fact I had no A/C on a top floor of a hot greenhouse-like sunlit apartment, living in an 1880’s brick building which looked very worn down though very livable by my standards, presence of worn used furniture and kitchen appliances, perceptions of an inadequate grocery budget, or that they felt I was “too crowded” by living with 3 other roommates in a 3 bedroom apartment.* </p>
<p>They weren’t terribly pleased when I pointed out my living situation was worlds better than what they had in their childhood in wartorn China or Taiwan in the '50s. From their reactions…they aren’t going to be thrilled if any of their kids or nieces/nephews had living situations which remotely reminded them of the hardships/poverty they faced in their youth. Admittedly, I could have afforded better…I just didn’t feel the need to spare the cash when the present circumstances suited me just fine. </p>
<ul>
<li>They wanted me to get a nicer apartment without roommates. I felt this was absurd, especially considering I never saw 2 of those roommates for weeks at a time because they were medical residents.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>
</p>
<p>I knew plenty of elementary school classmates and even some current college grads who lived in similar/worse situations you described above…except they’d consider cheap wine and used cars to be such a luxury it’d never enter the equation. </p>
<p>CLassmates lived in tiny low-end apartment buildings which by rights should have been condemned as unfit for human habitation by law due to landlord neglect, no heat, no A/C, no car, no bike, no money to even pay the bills for basic food/housing/medical needs…much less dining out or vacation. </p>
<p>I still know some people who live like the above or just marginally better whom I try to help out to make their lives more livable whether it’s helping them navigate legal avenues to get more responsiveness from landlords/finding better apartments given their financial situation or giving them older computers they could use for job searches and homework.</p>
<p>Make that 2000 and 2004. Remember that the US government went from surplus to deficit after the 2000 election, as the politicians who gained power increased spending (both military and non-military) while cutting taxes. This was a classic case of wanting more government while paying less for it.</p>
<p>Senior citizens tend to be the most reliable voters, so the retiring boomers will come out to vote to defend their Medicare and Social Security entitlements even if it means raising the (regressive) payroll taxes on working people. The addition of Medicare Part D without any funding source was called fiscally irresponsible by the political opposition of the time, but neither they nor the then-ruling party that is now claiming to espouse fiscal conservatism is making any move to repeal it.</p>
<p>“I don’t care what I have to do, I just want the peace of mind of knowing that I can pay my bills by myself. I’ll get there. Apart from taking out my student loans in the first place, I think I’ve been doing all the right things. I most certainly am not letting my boyfriend pay the rent by himself so I can drink starbucks and have a data plan. I have never lived with those kinds of luxuries and don’t ever expect to.”</p>
<p>Emaheevul07, I definitely empathize with your situation. The Metro Detroit area is hurting economically. </p>
<p>Parents, all the big cities (NYC, Boston, SF, Chicago, DC, Philly) have one thing in common: excellent public transit systems that allow fresh college graduates to maneuver around without owning a personal car. For some college grads, owning a car is too much of a hassle when over half your monthly salary goes towards housing and food. Gas prices are steadily $4-5/gallon, and auto insurance providers consistently overcharge young drivers. While the cost-of-living is ridiculously expensive, at least college graduates have the means to travel to work and build experience. If college graduates do relocate to smaller metropolitan areas, these cities don’t offer good public transit options (the exception seems to be college towns). Graduates also run the risk of not accepting the position because they can’t afford to buy a car to travel to work. Don’t forget about how this recession affected–even ruined–people’s credit scores, while students continue to pile on more student loan debt due to the rising tuition costs.</p>
<p>That may be changing as from what I’ve observed, the millennial generation are far more politically active and engaged in the political process during their late adolescence/young adulthood than my generation or even most boomers according to the boomer generation parents, teachers, and other older adults who were actually part of the Civil Rights/hippie/anti-Vietnam War movements. </p>
<p>On the last point…from their accounts…only a minority from the boomer generation were actually active and politically engaged despite current media generalizations of the boomer generation as being part of those political movements. </p>
<p>As far as they were concerned and remembered, most of their generation were just as apathetic about voting or participating in the political process during their youthful years as later generations…even though many of them would later castigate my generation (Gen X) for doing the same.</p>