And even though millennial women are more educated than millennial men, the wage gap persists.
Excerpt: "The disappearance of upward mobility hits millennials hardest. Because there is almost nothing they can do, whatsoever, period, to improve their situations. They are the ones who have had to work “unpaid internships” and take “entry level jobs” that never turn into anything else — just to get a foothold on the ladder. Only there is no ladder anymore. There’s just a foothold, that you cling to, in the desperate hope of not falling off entirely. Maybe it’s no surprise then that millennials are so depressed. Their potential, squandered, sent up in smoke, has been the real price of a society in which snakes have replaced ladders."
Nota Bene: The ultra-rich, spearheaded by Donald J. Trump, whose grotesque tax plan (and inter-locking matrix of policies that make the poor poorer) exacerbated everything that is wrong with the American economy, are the culprits. The reality of our situation is so grotesque that we don't even address it for fear of recognizing that "The Elephant In The Room" is the aggregate of rich, white men with no intention of making things better and every intention of sequestering more wealth to make things worse.
And "Peasants For Plutocracy" -- everyone of them of wearing a MAGA cap -- cheer them on!
The Facts Are In: The Republican Party Is Terrible For Prosperity But Unparalled At Catastrophe
Mark Twain, Adolf Hitler And The Dunning-Kruger Effect
"The Pitchforks Are Coming For Us Billionaires," Amazon Financier Nick Hanauer
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us.html
Ben Franklin On "No New Taxes"
Ben Franklin On "No New Taxes"
1910 Income Tax Promised To Never Shift Burden From Richest 1 - 4%
Tax Rates Under U.S. Presidents Since Eisenhower
(Why Millennials Are) America's First Poor Generation
Umair Haque
I read a truly shocking statistic today. Boomers held 21% of American wealth at age 35. Gen X, 8%. Millennials? Just 3%. Think about that for a second. 3%. They’re 25% of the total population. Maybe you’re not surprised. But aren’t you alarmed? You should be. Those are the numbers of social collapse. They’re Soviet numbers. What do they say?
Millennials have borne the brunt of America’s imploded economy and failing society. It’s true that it’s bad for everyone who’s not a Bezos or a Gates — but it’s also true that it’s especially, surreally, unbelievably bad for millennials. America’s failed in three key ways.
First, incomes haven’t risen in half a century. But costs have been skyrocketing since about the late 1980s. Millennials are caught in the pincers of that trap hardest. They earn less, in real terms, than their grandparents did — but somehow, they are asked to pay for education, healthcare, housing, and bills that cost somewhere between 5, 10, or maybe 100 times as much.
The truth is that nobody — nobody can afford to live a decent life on an average American income anymore. $60K doesn’t buy you healthcare, housing, childcare, elderly care, education, bills — it barely even buys you maybe two or three of those things. But millennials aren’t even earning that much. Their average income is $30K, maybe $35K. How are they to afford all those things? Any of them? It’s laughable, isn’t it?
Hence, millennial culture is one of a kind of cynical, ironic fatalism. I don’t mean that in a mean or judgmental way. I mean it only in an explanatory one. You’d be bitter and fatalistic, too, if your society paid you $35K per year — if you were lucky — but only by indebting you to the point that you’d spend much of your life paying it off to begin with. That’s something more like indentured servitude with a polite name than it is freedom. Yes, really. What else does it mean when you spend most of your life paying back debt you incurred just to…live? You’d have to make everything a kind of joke about powerlessness, too.
The End Of US Democracy: Trump Is "Just" A Symptom Of Staggering -- And Staggeringly Misguided -- Cultural, Economic And Political Forces
Second, the economy offers people no upward mobility anymore — no real shot at a better life. The average American will live a worse life than his or her grandparents — no matter what they do, how hard they work, whatever they try. That is because upward mobility has all but vanished. That, in turn, is because the middle class imploded. America is now something very much like a caste society of a tiny number of ultra rich, a very large number of new poor, and a smaller number of old poor. The average person lives right at the edge, paycheck to paycheck. What social position or stratum you were born into largely determines your chances and outcomes in life. Born rich? You might become super rich. Born middle class? Welcome to the new poor. Born poor? Welcome to the very bottom.
The disappearance of upward mobility hits millennials hardest. Because there is almost nothing they can do, whatsoever, period, to improve their situations. They are the ones who have had to work “unpaid internships” and take “entry level jobs” that never turn into anything else — just to get a foothold on the ladder. Only there is no ladder anymore. There’s just a foothold, that you cling to, in the desperate hope of not falling off entirely. Maybe it’s no surprise then that millennials are so depressed. Their potential, squandered, sent up in smoke, has been the real price of a society in which snakes have replaced ladders.
Second, real living standards get worse every day. Life expectancy falls. Real income falls. Savings fall — past the zero point. Happiness falls. Anxiety rises. Depression soars. Suicide surges. I could go on, but that’s already a horrifying list — which, though we’ve grown accustomed to, we shouldn’t accept as normal. It’s not. It reflects vast multitudes of lives simply withering away and declining.
The rapid, stunning decline of living standards hits millennials hardest. They’re the ones without anything to cushion them. They don’t have savings or accomplishments or careers yet. They haven’t even forged their relationships yet. Hence, they have no real professional, social. or personal safety nets. Maybe it’s no surprise that so many of them are living in their parents’ homes. Maybe it’s no surprise they’re having less sex, fewer relationships, and putting off getting married and having kids.
If your life seems to be falling apart — no matter what you do, how hard you try — how are you going to have a marriage? Won’t you end up taking some of that despair and rage out on your partner? And who can even think of having kids when nothing you do ever seems to earn you a decent life anyways? Maybe you’d hate to take three anti-depressants, too. Maybe you’d be addicted to your phone, too, if “real” life was that bleak.
Third, the middle class careers and industries of the past have been utterly destroyed, and there’s no real way to make an honest living anymore. What there is is a casino economy --- where you either join the house, or take your chances playing the game.
Let me explain what I mean.
What career options does a millennial really have? One, do a simple, humble, everyday job — be a teacher, farmer, small-town lawyer, accountant, plumber…and watch your life slowly implode, never make ends meet. Two, join the tiny number of massive winners of this economy — angle for a job at a Google, Amazon, or Facebook. But that’s joining the house, because the third choice is the weird panoply of non-careers open to millennials.
Hey! Don’t worry about so much about the future! Just become a YouTube star! Go become an Instafluencer! Maybe you can make a living off those funny, cynical, ironic tweets! Maybe one day you can own your own fleet of Ubers, or become an AirBnB landlord! Do you see what I mean a little? This weird, bizarre collection of not-quite-careers are the only real opportunities for upward mobility millennials really have.
But they are more like winning the lottery than devoting yourself to a career with a stable, secure payoff. Sure, you can try to become a YouTube star or an Influencer or what have you — but the chances of succeeding are exactly like playing the lottery. A tiny, tiny number of people win very, very big — and everybody else is essentially subsidizing them, earning nothing, or maybe a pittance every now and then. And furthermore, none of these are really “careers” in the sense that they don’t come with any kind of security or benefits whatsoever. Even if you do make it big on YouTube…what happens when the algorithm changes?
Consultant-types call these “portfolio careers” or maybe “entrepreneurship.” And don’t get me wrong. It’s nice that these new options exist. But not at the expense of the old ones. It should be not just possible but probable to make a good living... by doing simple, humble work — not just to strike it temporarily and precariously rich by becoming internet famous. A casino is seductive and glamorous — but it’s not a replacement for a functioning economy.
Now there’s a simpler way to put all that. Millennials are America’s first truly poor generation. They are the ones living at the inflection point of American decline and collapse, and so they are its first poor generation, too. Previous generations have had it tough, sure — but they’ve never really lived in the bizarre... poverty that millennials do. All the things I’ve described to you above are simply the realities of poverty, and that is what millennials really are: poor.
They don’t have money. They don’t have opportunities. They don’t have safety nets. They don’t have cushions. They don’t have mobility. They have to rely on their parents — if they’re lucky — and maybe live at home well into their middle age. They can’t afford things like healthcare, education, housing, and bills — they simply don’t earn enough money, never have, and never will. They can’t even afford to have basic relationships and marriages and partnerships anymore — one of the truest signs of real poverty.
What they do have is debt, decline, stagnation, and despair.
What they do have is debt, decline, stagnation, and despair.
Millennials are learning what it means to be poor... Genuinely, truly poor. To not be able to afford basics. A house, healthcare, paying off one’s debt, transport, savings, being able to pay the bills on time, a cushion for emergencies, a present or vacation for the loved ones so that relationships stay happy, stable things. Millennials can’t really afford any of those things. And so mostly, they don’t have them.
Now, nobody’s saying millennials live like the Congolese — like old, global poverty. But the deprivation of the basics is what poverty really is —and that applies to modern, stable, middle-class societies, too. Millennials are the first generation whose fortunes have declined in America — and they have declined so sharply and swiftly that millennials are effectively poor, even if their parents might have been prosperous. (Alan: Emphasis mine)
So millennials live in a new, weird kind of poverty — the poverty of decline, of downward mobility, of stagnation. They are like the Soviet Union’s last generation, in a sense — only the mirror image: American collapse’s first truly poor generation. The first generation to have to live in a formerly wealthy country which now has an imploded middle class, no functioning social systems, predatory institutions, failed elites, and broken dreams. They are deprived of the things, material and immaterial, of a decent life. And so they make do, with what they can have, which isn’t much — mostly, digital things, that are free, like memes and jokes and tweets and whatnot. (There are other groups of long-standing poor, of course. Blacks, minorities, many kinds of marginalized people. But other generations? Not really — at least for a very, very long time now.)
There are many, many people who’ll find that uncomfortable, or maybe impossible to accept. Older folks will say: “we had it tougher!” Maybe. But they also had it easier, in key ways, too. There were bouts of inflation and unemployment, sure — but the economy hadn’t failed. Politics might not have been stable — but it hadn’t been taken over by extremists, either. Life might have been a struggle — but the dream hadn’t been shattered into pieces yet, either. Millennials are America’s first truly poor generation — or at least it’s first in a very long time, in modern times, since the Great Depression.
Am I asking you to cry for millennials? Not really. I’m asking you to see a cold, hard, brutal truth.
America is the world’s first poor rich country. And millennials are the first generation of new poor in it, the first full generation to experience the terrible, swift, shocking decline from prosperity to precarity. Young people without opportunities, chances, savings, incomes, safety nets, relationships, a future, the dream. They don’t know it perhaps, and no one seems to talk about — but they are learning what it means to live in poverty. And in that way, they are teaching the world, too, about what it really means to be a failed society.
Umair
November 2019
Alan: It will sound like I could not possibly mean what I'm about to say - that I must be using hyperbole, or parody, or some other figure of speech.
No.
I tell you the truth.
If anything, I tell you the unadorned truth in a minimalist way.
In its heart of hearts, The Republican Party is devoted to two things:
1.) Making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
2.) Falsehood.
No.
I tell you the truth.
If anything, I tell you the unadorned truth in a minimalist way.
In its heart of hearts, The Republican Party is devoted to two things:
1.) Making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
2.) Falsehood.
The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their own eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall.
The Evangelical Persecution Complex
(Projection's Finest Hour)
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass Final Judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Remarkably, although they are prone to believe all manner of Trumpeted nonsense, none of them are tempted to believe in their own spiritual peril.
The Pharisees Are Always With Us.
Here's What They "Look Like" Today
But never mind.
If you can rationalize Trump, you can rationalize anything.
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Income Pie.
They're Taking It All"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Income Pie.
They're Taking It All"
"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium
"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
Time Out Of Mind "Deep State Plutocracy" Is The Enduring Conspiracy. Warfare And Racial Animus Is The Decoy
"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"
Time Out Of Mind "Deep State Plutocracy" Is The Enduring Conspiracy. Warfare And Racial Animus Is The Decoy
Plutocracy: The Short Course
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/10/plutocracy-short-course.html
Plutocracy: The Short Course
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/10/plutocracy-short-course.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2019/10/plutocracy-short-course.html
No comments:
Post a Comment