The future is awful for anybody under 40, and the reason for this is because, as I have constantly noted, all of the wealth of the country has been sucked out of her owing to decades of abusive policies that profited the present-then and the expense of the future-now. The Boomers are going to be fine, and a lot of Gen X, but Millennials and Zoomers have no financial future. I have said this many times based on economic reports and fundamentals, and according to a story from the Wall Street Journal, this is the case, as Millennials now find themselves in the second recession induced by the COVID-19 virus now back on unemployment and with a sense of no hope for their financial future, and with that the inability to buy homes and live a “normal” life.
Millennials have found it fundamentally more difficult to start a career and achieve the financial independence that allowed previous generations to get married, buy a home and have children. Even the most educated millennials are employed at lower rates than older college graduates, research shows, and millennials’ tendency to work at lower-paying firms has caused them to lag behind in earnings.
“It’s a sign that something has broken in the way the economy is working,” said Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration. “It’s gotten harder and harder for people to find their footholds.”
As a result, the millennial generation has less wealth than their predecessors had at the same age, and about one-quarter of millennial households have more debt than assets, according to the St. Louis Fed.
More millennials than older generations havelost jobs because of the coronavirus-triggered recession.
About one in six were unable to cover a $400 emergency expense before the pandemic started; that share is about one in eight among all Americans, the bank found.
Millennials are now at risk of falling further behind because they entered the pandemic in a weaker position than older Americans. (source)
It is absolutely critical to understand that this has NOTHING to do with poor spending practices, a lack of saving, or the highly aggravating trope of “lazy avocado toast munching hippies.”
The reason why the Millennials and Zoomers are so finanically destitute is because of POLICIES created and supported by the so-called “Greatest Generation”, “Silent Generation”, and the Boomers. These include but are not limited to supporting currency devaluation, the liberalization of free trade to removing all tariffs (thus destroying the industrial tier of the US economy), promoting job outsourcing with importing cheap labor to the US at below-market rates, creating a complex tier of “requirements” for US citizens to pass through at great expense, creating regulations that the previous generations never had to endure, forcing people at a young age to go into extreme debt to get an “education”, and allowing for moral rot to spread while promoting or ignoring it.
People don’t just “hate Boomers” because they are old- they have anger because they had power to help their children but instead spent their childrens’ futures on themselves and sent their children the bill.
Likewise, there is no point to saving money for most unless one makes over a certain threshold, because the devaluation of the currency is moving so fast that one’s money loses value as soon as one gets it, and in such a case, it is more logical to spend it on necessities than keep an asset that remains in decline.
This is why Millennials cannot “advance”- because the pathway has been blocked by the actions of their parents and grandparents and who continue to not help them.
Now I am not saying that things could not change. The future is always in motion, and a lot of things can happen. But right now, things are looking pretty bad, and there is really no good answer for solving them, as the patterns for the future show one more akin to the old world that many fled from becoming a contemporary reality.
The Boomers better enjoy what they have, because- and I say this not as a threat, but as a warning about the cycles of history as good counsel to all because we all need to help each other and serious disruptions are a trend to watch for -as the Millennials and Zoomers take power, being that they do not have religion, they have been mistreated by the system they were told was going to help them, and are inclined to extreme political ideologies owing to the polarization of society, they will look for extreme answers to their problems, and will manifest this in their political choices at the ballot box.
2020 is going to be the last “Boomer” election in that Boomers will have power in it, ending their 40-year lock on the ballot box. Millennials and Zoomers are taking over, and they are angry and just as how the Boomers promoted “revolution” in the 1960s, this is going to continue, but this time with polities meant to “make things fair”, and that could result in violence. Again, understand this is not a “spoiled brat” attitude, but rather an attempt to seek justice- albeit in a very flawed way -from a generation who feels stripped down and economically abused, and wants something good for themselves and their children.