America Has Failed Its Millennials, Robert Reich
Last edited Sat Jan 11, 2020, 09:50 PM - Edit history (1)
Truthdig, Jan. 9, 2020. The same forces that are driving massive inequality between the top 1 percent and the rest of us are creating a vast generational wealth gap between baby boomers my generation and millennials.
Millennials arent teenagers anymore. Theyre working hard, starting families and trying to build wealth. But as a generation, theyre way behind. Theyre deeper in debt, only half as likely to own a home, and more likely to live in poverty than their parents. If we want to address their problems, we need to understand those problems.
Number one: Stagnant wages. Median wages grew by an average of 0.3% per year between 2007 and 2017, including the Great Recession just as millennials were beginning their careers. Before that, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, wages grew at three times that rate.
Second: As wages have stagnated, the costs of essentials like housing and education have been going through the roof. Millennials own fewer homes, the most common way Americans have built wealth in the past. Education costs have soared. Adjusted for inflation, the average college education in 2018 cost nearly three times what it did in 1978.
Third: As a result of all of this, Debt. That expensive college education means that the average graduate carries a whopping $28,000 in student loan debt. As a generation, millennials are more than one trillion dollars in the red. In addition, the average young adult carries nearly $5,000 in credit card debt, and this number is growing.
Fourth: Millennials are finding it harder than previous generations to save for the future. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 81 sponsored a pension plan in 2017, thats down from 288 twenty years ago. Employers are replacing pensions with essentially do-it-yourself savings plans.
All of this means that fewer millennials are entering the middle class than previous generations. Most have less than $1,000 in savings. Many young people today wont be able to retire until 75, if at all.
If we dont start trying to reduce this generational wealth gap through policies like debt relief, accessible health insurance, paid family leave, affordable housing, and a more equitable tax code for renters millions of young Americans will struggle to find financial security for the rest of their lives.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/robert-reich-america-has-failed-its-millennials/
- 'Four Reasons Why Millennials Don't Have Any Money,' Robert Reich.
~ Millennials b. 1981-1996.
SWBTATTReg
(22,181 posts)sees this great disparity of wealth, the great fraud that is the 'American Dream'...
appalachiablue
(41,182 posts)NotHardly
(1,062 posts)since the wealth gap is between the multi-millionaires/billionaires and the rest of us, it is simply boorish and tiresome for any commentator to presume that somehow the 95 percent of us that are not those guys are to be held responsible for the policies that screw us, threaten what little we have saved, threaten to shrink Medicare and Social Security... I'm tired of being lectures by f**king pandering-know-it-nothings on both sides. Hell, I can't even get my vote to count 'cause corporations are people too, so quite with the whining lectures. These pontificates need to shut up and actually do something and get off my aching back.
BigmanPigman
(51,643 posts)is at its lowest since 1900. Millennial know they are screwed.
Skittles
(153,226 posts)K&R