Unemployment rates of those 16-24 are now officially over 50%. Even the cohort between 16 and 29 suffers from 45% unemployment. In short, in four years we have become Europeanized: young people with no jobs who are living at home and putting off marriage and child raising — a “lost” generation in “limbo,” etc. etc. They may have a car, borrow their parents’ nicer car for special occasions, watch their parents’ big screen TV, and have pocket change for a cell phone and laptop by enjoying free rent, food, and laundry, but beneath that thinning technological veneer there is really little hope that they will ever be able to maintain that lifestyle on their own in this present day and age. Meanwhile, just like some Middle East tribal society, “contacts,” “networking,” and “pull” are the new gospel, as parents rely on quid pro quos to offer their indebted, unemployed (and aging) children some sort of inside one-upmanship in the cutthroat job market.This is the part that really hurts:
But these days, the game has changed somewhat — or rather been downscaled: the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money, produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.Read the whole thing.
For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40 percent of America's youth vote, a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters.
Pollster John Zogby of JZ Analytics told Secrets Tuesday that Romney received 41 percent in his weekend poll of 1,117 likely voters, for the first time crossing the 40 percent mark. What's more, he said that Romney is the only Republican of those who competed in the primaries to score so high among 18-29 year olds.The Zogby poll is not an anomaly. According to a poll by CIRCLE Romney was already doing much better than McCain among young voters even before the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket.
Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE -- a nonpartisan group that conducts research on young Americans’ political participation -- said that Romney clearly has improved over McCain’s standing with young voters but that the Arizona senator’s campaign set a low benchmark at a time when Republican youths were particularly unengaged.
“I don’t believe the fact that Ryan is relatively young himself has that much of an appeal,” Levine said. “There’s a tendency to think young people are just into superficiality, but I tend to find they vote based on their policy views.”
In a nationwide poll conducted online and released weeks before the addition of Ryan to the GOP ticket, CIRCLE found that Obama was leading Romney by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin among 18-to-29-year-old voters.
You won’t have to pay the tax if:Indians aren't subject to the Obamacare tax? Who knew?
- you’re not in the U.S. legally;
- you’re in prison;
- you’re poor (measured two different ways);
- you’re a member of an Indian tribe;
- you’re in a period of being uninsured that’s less than three months long;
- your religion forbids getting health insurance; or
- you get a waiver from HHS.
Back to the 1930s
Social scientists say these young adults are a lot like the Americans who came of age in the early 1930s, both in the economic upheaval they confront and in the attitudes toward success, contentment and risk aversion that they are forming.
"The economic situation (of young adults) is completely parallel and analogous to the (Depression-era) GI generation — raised in relative affluence, and then just as they are to start in that affluent world, it all comes crashing down," says Morley Winograd, who has co-authored several books on Millennials, the generation born from 1982 to 2003. "And so they have to find new ways to persevere. They just have assumed that everything that came before them was a mirage — that it was false, built on unsafe foundations."
A Harvard University Institute of Politics survey in March and April found that more than three out of four college students expect to have a somewhat or very difficult time finding a job. And 45% expect student loans to affect their financial circumstances "a lot" after they graduate.
Their pessimism is based on the experience of the 20-somethings just ahead of them. A Rutgers University study this spring of 444 graduates who received bachelor's degrees from 2006 to 2011 found that 51% were working full time. The rest were in graduate school, unemployed, working part time or no longer in the job market.
One in four were living with parents. Those who got jobs beginning in 2008, the height of the Great Recession, earned a starting salary, on average, 10% less than those graduates who entered the job market in 2006 and 2007, according to the Rutgers survey. All this has happened as the total amount of student loan debt in the USA surpassed $900 billion.
But opponents of illegal immigration warned that the policy could create significant new competition for jobs and university slots at a time of nationwide recession and numerous states’ efforts to curb public spending.
“I see a tidal wave coming,” said Brad Botwin, president of Help Save Maryland, a group that opposes legalization for undocumented immigrants. “Half of our college graduates today can’t find jobs, and the unemployment rate for high-school-aged Americans is extremely high. This is unfair to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who are out there struggling to get ahead.”
The Taylors aren't alone. The economic hammer has fallen especially hard on 20somethings — part of the so-called Millennial Generation or Gen Y born roughly between 1975 and 1995. Plagued by high unemployment, many have had to delay careers, marriage and having children. And the idea of owning a home is more often being put off or written off entirely.
In a nation where homeownership is part of the American dream, a generation of renters could alter communities where they live and redefine the idea of middle-class success.
'A Recipe For Frustration'
"They've seen what their parents are dealing with, what their brothers and sisters are dealing with, in terms of being saddled with home values that are less than what was paid for," says Paul Conway, a former chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Labor who is now president of Generation Opportunity, a think tank specializing in the economics of Generation Y.
Sociologist Katherine Newman, who chronicles some of the struggles in her book The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition, agrees with Conway that we may be witnessing the creation of a generation of renters.
"I'm hoping that the Millennial Generation doesn't set its sights on homeownership as a benchmark of economic stability, because it's going to be out of reach for so many of them that it will just be a recipe for frustration," she says.
According to Crossroads Generation, a group dedicated to reaching young people with the messages promoting individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise, in the recall election Walker carried the vote of those under the age of 25.
"According to exit polling," the group said, "for voters aged 18-29, the Democrats' advantage among this group was cut in half compared to 2010. While Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett held a ten-point advantage among 18-29 year olds in the 2010 election, that gap was reduced to five points in Tuesday's election."
The number of 25-to-34-year-olds owning homes in Massachusetts plunged 20 percent between 2005 and 2010, even as the overall number of homeowners in the state increased slightly, according to the US census. The rate of homeownership, which measures the percentage of housing units occupied by owners, fell more for 25-to-34-year-olds than any other age group, declining to 34 percent from 40 percent in 2005.
High unemployment, crushing student debt, and tight credit conditions are keeping many young adults and families from becoming homeowners, analysts and real estate professionals said. At the same time, the turmoil that has followed since prices peaked in 2005 and the housing market collapsed is changing this younger generation’s view of housing, long thought of as a safe, sure investment and prerequisite to the American dream.Government created the housing bubble. Many of these young people who saw their older friends and siblings buy homes only to find their residence deeply underwater. It's no wonder that young people today are hesitant to make such an investment.
Ericka Seastrand graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in consumer science. She beat the pavement for nine months, and the only job she could get was retail sales associate at a mall.
"The market was really competitive," the 26-year-old from West Milwaukee recalled last week. "My degree was a generic business degree - nothing technical or tangible in the skill set. So I decided to get another degree with a hard skill set."
Seastrand is one of a surprising number of 20-somethings who graduated from college in recent years, couldn't find good-paying jobs with their four-year degrees, and enrolled in a technical college to earn a second degree or diploma geared toward specific job opportunities.
In the last three years, 6.4% of the total number of degrees and diplomas awarded at Waukesha County Technical College went to 20-somethings who self-reported they had at least 16 years of education before enrolling at the technical college, according to data analysis requested by the Journal Sentinel. Twenty-somethings represented 79.5% of all WCTC's grads from 2009 to 2011 who already had bachelor's degrees.
Notwithstanding their collective $200 billion in spending power, and an awesome ability to drive cultural and fashion trends, millennials are not feeling flush these days. Those not drowning financially are often treading water at best, according to surveys like the one released last month by WSL/Strategic Retail, a consulting firm that tracks shopping and retail trends.
Millennials now represent “the highest percentage of Americans lacking enough money to meet their basic needs,” outdistancing Gen X-ers and baby boomers in that dubious regard, according to the survey.
Burdened by $1 trillion in college debt, millennials seek the lowest price on most of their purchased items (80 percent say), shop for lower-priced brands whenever possible (60 percent), and do much of their bargain hunting online (57 percent), the WSL survey found.
Call them Generation Groupon. And with thousands more collecting their college diplomas this spring, ever more of them are sailing into young adulthood, ready or not.
Less normal is how many Americans have come to think that the country is not just passing through a rough patch but is in long-term decline. A survey of 12 swing states found 55% agreeing that the jobs being created in the recovery are of lower quality than those jobs lost during the recession. By a margin of nearly two to one, Americans expect their children’s jobs, salaries and benefits to be worse than their own. Some 35% go so far as to say that America’s best days are behind it.
Allow me to be the first one not to congratulate you. Through exertions that—let's be honest—were probably less than heroic, most of you have spent the last few years getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree. Now you're entering a lousy economy, courtesy of the very president whom you, as freshmen, voted for with such enthusiasm. Please spare us the self-pity about how tough it is to look for a job while living with your parents. They're the ones who spent a fortune on your education only to get you back— return-to-sender, forwarding address unknown.
Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree-holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.
"I don't even know what I'm looking for," said Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.
GERMANY is proposing to levy extra taxes on the young to pay for the costs of the country's growing numbers of old people, under government plans for a ''demographic reserve'' levy.
Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats have drafted proposals that, if law, would require all those over 25 to pay a proportion of their income to cushion Germany against a looming population crisis.
The German Chancellor's ruling party is seeking extra sources of revenue to pay for soaring pensions and bills for social care costs as Germany's ''baby boomer'' generation ages amid a decline in the birth rate.
College students in nearly all states will be hit with a triple whammy. First of all, tuitions are increasing at public universities and colleges in large part because ObamaCare restricts governors from making changes to Medicaid eligibility that would reduce their state's health-care costs. Consequently, higher education is one of the first places they can cut.
College students are being hit again because the federal government took over the student-loan business in 2010, eliminating the competition. This allows the Education Department to borrow money from Treasury at an interest rate of 2.8% and lend it to college students at a rate of 6.8%. A portion of the profits from overcharging students will be used to help pay for ObamaCare.
And the third blow comes as college students graduate and enter a depressed job market where employers are creating fewer jobs as a result of the high costs associated with ObamaCare. Analysts at UBS have suggested as much when they stated in a September 2011 report that the health-care law is "arguably the biggest impediment to hiring, particularly hiring of less skilled workers."
JUSTICE ALITO: But isn't that a very small part of what the mandate is doing? You can correct me if these figures are wrong, but it appears to me that the CBO has estimated that the average premium for a single insurance policy in the non-group market would be roughly $5,800 in — in 2016.
Respondents — the economists have supported — the Respondents estimate that a young, healthy individual targeted by the mandate on average consumes about $854 in health services each year. So the mandate is forcing these people to provide a huge subsidy to the insurance companies for other purposes that the act wishes to serve, but isn't — if those figures are right, isn't it the case that what this mandate is really doing is not requiring the people who are subject to it to pay for the services that they are going to consume? It is requiring them to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else.
GENERAL VERRILLI: No, I think that — I do think that's what the Respondents argue. It's just not right. I think it — it really gets to a fundamental problem with their argument.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: If you're going to have insurance, that's how insurance works.
GENERAL VERRILLI: A, it is how insurance works, but, B, the problem that they — that they are identifying is not that problem. The — the guaranteed issue and community rating reforms do not have the effect of forcing insurance companies to take on lots of additional people who they then can't afford to cover because they're — they tend to be the sick, and that is — in fact, the exact opposite is what happens here.
About 50 high school students at Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes to protest a host of issues at the all-boys school. The concerns included a lack of consistent teachers and the removal of the principal. The boys, dressed in school blazers, neckties and hoodies, chanted, "We want education!" as they marched outside the school. Parents organized the walkout because they fear for the school's future. As recently as last month, students spent weeks passing time in the gym, library or cafeteria due to a lack of teachers, parents saidIf the failings of the education bureaucracy had even 1% of the attention of that of the single Trayvon Martin case, there may be some hope for these young people.
ROME — Assunta Linza, a bright-eyed 33-year-old with a college degree in psychology, has been unemployed since June, after losing a temporary job as a call-center operator. Her father, who is 60 and has a fifth-grade education, took early retirement with full benefits at age 42 from a job as a workman at the Italian state railway company.
“Everyone said that kids should study to get ahead, but I graduated with highest honors, and the only thing my degree is good for is to hang on the wall,” Ms. Linza said dryly.
After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and completing a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, Cassie Owens was left with a few dollars on her stipend and no job in sight. So, Ms. Owens returned home to her mother in Philadelphia.
“I moved back home pretty much for lack of money and prospects,” she says. Owens’s cousin, Evon Burton, who also returned home after graduating from Morehouse College in 2009, adds, “The choice is to go out and be in debt or to pursue your dreams and save up money at home, in a safe, stable environment.”
OF ALL the euro zone’s many problems, youth unemployment is perhaps the most distressing. Joblessness among young workers is around 30% in Portugal and nearly 50% in Spain. Above-average unemployment is the norm for young people, even in more liberal markets like America’s. But Spain’s youth unemployment rate jumped by nearly 20 percentage points between 2007 and 2009, compared with a rise of seven points in America. Labour-market regulations take much of the blame: while hard-to-fire older workers luxuriate on permanent contracts, the young are typically hired temporarily and are easier to sack.
