Millennials – Page 7 – The Burning Platform

The Last Nail In The Millennials’ Coffin: A Negative 2% Savings Rate

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/10/2014 08:13 -0500

We have extensively covered the economic devastation that currently plagues the largest and most important age cohort in the US: adults under 35, also known as Millennials. For a refresher see Millennials Devastated As American Dream Becomes Nightmare For Most, On Crushing Student Loans, Worthless College Degrees And The Millennials, Dear Recently Graduated Millennials: Prepare To Work Until You Are 73, and of course, Meet The Millennials: All You Ever Wanted To Know About America’s Youth, In Charts. Today, we present the latest nail in the coffin of the generation which none other than Obama said he is betting on to “Help Shape the New American Economy.”

The bottom line, or rather, negative line, is the Millennials’ savings, because “after a flirtation with thrift after the recession, young Americans have stopped saving. Adults under age 35—the so-called millennial generation—currently have a savings rate of negative 2%, meaning they are burning through their assets or going into debt, according to Moody’s Analytics. That compares with a positive savings rate of about 3% for those age 35 to 44, 6% for those 45 to 54, and 13% for those 55 and older.”

From the WSJ:

The turnabout in savings tendencies shows how the personal finances of millennials have become increasingly precarious despite five years of economic growth and sustained job creation. A lack of savings increases the vulnerability of young workers in the postrecession economy, leaving many without a financial cushion for unexpected expenses, raising the difficulty of job transitions and leaving them further away from goals like eventual homeownership—let alone retirement.

“In the very near term it’s a plus for spending and economic growth, but in the long run these households are not saving, and that will impair their ability to spend in the future,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics who calculated the numbers with Moody’s economist Mustafa Akcay.

the new Moody’s data—using a technique developed at the Federal Reserve to combine its Survey of Consumer Finances and Financial Accounts of the United States reports—show how savings rates diverge across demographic groups.

Here is the problem: recall that Janet Yellen’s “suggestion” to defeat record wealth inequality is for “poorer” Americans to build assets. Well, there is a problem when you can’t even save enough to have $1 left in your pocket at the end of the month after all expenses:

“I’ve been saving almost exclusively in my mind,” said 26-year-old Emily Turner, a 2010 graduate of Villanova University who lives in southern Maryland. Most of her paycheck from the digital consulting and web-design firm she works for “doesn’t even make it to a conventional bank account. I’ve certainly not had the opportunity to invest in stocks or anything.”

The rest is well-known to regular ZH readers:

The problems from a lack of savings promise to reverberate for years. Those who don’t save are unlikely to be wealthy in the future, meaning American angst over wealth inequality seems poised to persist if most millennials are unable to save or choose not to.

Young households’ wealth has declined even more than their incomes. In the previous generation, Americans who were under 35 in 1995—often labeled Generation X—earned wages that were 9% higher than today after adjusting for inflation. Now, the median millennial has a net worth of $10,400, down 42% from $18,200 for Generation X, according to Fed data.

Why the disastrous economic data for America’s most important generation? The answer is simple: the economy is, despite all the pomp and propaganda, still a disaster. That, and of course, the $1.2 trillion student loan bubble.

For some young households, the inability to save reflects the weak job market, said Shai Akabas, an economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center. While unemployment nationally has fallen below 6%, workers age 25 to 34 have a 6.2% unemployment rate and those 20 to 24 face 10.5% unemployment.

“There’s people who really can’t save because they don’t have the means to save and that’s not a small group of people,” Mr. Akabas said. “If you’re in a $25,000-a-year job and starting a family, it’s going to be very hard to accumulate savings regardless of your consumption decisions.”

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Another big difference from earlier generations is the rise of student loans. In 1995, borrowers under 35 had median student debt of $6,100, according to Fed data. That has risen to $17,200.

For Ms. Turner, debts include $5,000 in student loans, $3,000 on credit cards and $6,000 borrowed from family. “There’s no formal note for that, but it resides in my psyche that I will pay it back at some point,” she said.

“I know I shouldn’t have accepted credit so freely,” she said. “But part of youth, the wiring of a young person, is the focus on really short-term gratification.”

And then there is also the fact that Millennials just prefer to live well:

The money mostly went to her social life and travel, [Emily Turner] says: a trip to Central America, a wedding in Southern California, a bachelorette party in Austin, Texas, trips to Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., to see friends, another bachelorette party in Austin.

There was a sign it wouldn’t be this way. After the recession, the savings rates of those under age 35 climbed to 5.2% in 2009 and even briefly surpassed the savings of those age 35 to 44, according to Moody’s.

Don’t worry Emily, soon enough you won’t have the ability to fund such distractions at which point you can once again focus wholeheartedly on boosting your savings. Best of luck.

And in other comedic news, here is Obama’s recent Op-Ed targeting the Millennials:

Why I’m Betting on You to Help Shape the New American Economy

History has dubbed you the “Millennials.”

You’re part of the first generation to grow up in the digital age. Some of you grew up with cell phones tucked into your book bags, while others can remember the early days of landline, dial-up internet. You’ve gone from renting movies on VHS tapes to purchasing and downloading them in a matter of minutes.

Today, more of you are earning college degrees than ever before — and more young people from low-income families are getting a shot at higher education than previous generations. Along with having higher education levels, you’ve got a lower gender pay gap than other generations?—?and we’re working to close it even further. Take all those things together, and it’s no surprise that entrepreneurship is in your DNA. One survey found that more than half of Millennials expressed interest in starting (or have already started) their own business.

So here’s something we know for certain: Your rising generation of Americans isn’t just adapting to a 21st-century economy. You’re actively changing it.

And we know that when we invest in your potential, rather than stack the deck in favor of the folks who are already at the top, our entire economy does better. It’s the reason we’ve expanded grants, tax credits, and loans to help more families afford college. It’s why we’re giving nearly 5 million Americans the chance to cap student loan payments at 10 percent of their income. And thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured young adults has fallen by nearly 40 percent over the past four years.

You may have graduated into the worst recession since the Great Depression, but today — for all the challenges you’ve already faced, and after all the grueling work it’s taken to bounce back — you’re in the best position to break into the newest sectors of the new American economy.

…

Throughout my time in office, my Administration has bet on American innovation. We’ve bet on America’s young people. And today, I’m betting that you’ll continue unleashing new ideas and new enterprises for decades to come.

And that’s why dear Americans young people, you are fucked.

For further proof, see here:

Etc.

The Election (In 1 ‘Uncomfortably Divided’ Nation Chart)

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/05/2014 09:07 -0500

Isn’t it ironic that the demographic in America that has seen the largest job growth during the ‘recovery’ turned out in droves to vote (against the incumbents) while the generation that remain mired in student debt, living at home with their mom-and-dad in record amounts, and having lost hope of the American Dream were apparently uninterested in ‘change’. Perhaps, just perhaps, the elder generation still believes there is a difference between the two parties… or perhaps they are the ones who are most pissed as the promises of sipping margaritas on a golden beach in retirement is crushed into the reality of working to your grave at Home Depot…

Irony?

h/t @NBCNews

Which is ironic given that the Over-60s (and only over-60s) have been hired in droves…

Here is the breakdown of job gains by all age groups since the start of the depression in December 2007: 5.5 million jobs “gained” in the 55-69 age group. What about the core, 25-54 demographic? Negative 2.04 million.

* * *

As Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow noted this morning,

U.S. midterm elections yday turned out pretty much like the polls suggested; I was a little surprised to see how many stories led with economy and how many exit polls said that — it may have been the economy, but it’s not that it’s doing particularly poorly. If anything, the numbers are doing ok, it’s that people felt the distribution of the “ok” had got the balance out of whack, that neither party was listening to Main Street, aka, the citizenry.

Democrats had the bad misfortune of being the Ins, and the Ins got thrown out. This really was a wakeup call for the establishment writ large, not particularly a poke at the Democrats other than more is expected from them

Having said that, elections have consequences, so we’re in for an interesting period; I did read one portfolio manager in Europe saying this would be good for the economy, decision making would pick up. I don’t see it – I think you just have an electorate that felt deserted by the people they thought would protect them, and Washington became synonymous with Wall St. Helps explain a lot of more populous frustrations globally.

* * *

Forget racism, prepare for ageism.

Meet The Millennials: All You Ever Wanted To Know About America’s Youth, In Charts

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/25/2014 20:00 -0400

When it comes to the future of the US, the biggest question mark by far is anything relating to the Millennial generation, those Americans born between 1980 and 2000, which happens to be one of the biggest generations in US history.

In fact, the largest US age cohort is currently the 23 year olds. However, Millennials are different from previous generations in many ways. For example, today’s 25-34 year olds are more likely to be minorities (40%) and a higher share of them has college degrees (35%). In addition, they are choosing different fields of study in college: while engineering was in the top five bachelors’ degrees awarded in 1980, in 2010, psychology replaced it in the top five rankings. This student debt-bubble funded college infatuation also happens to be the biggest curse of the Millennials, and as discussed a year ago, “Millennials Are Devastated As American Dream Becomes Nightmare For Most.”

Still, despite their differences, and the over $1 trillion in student debt which is making the US economic recovery virtually impossible, Millennials are in many ways like prior generations. Or rather better be if there is to be any hope of the conventional Keynesian medicine fixing a problem that may be at its core demographic (just like in Japan).

In order to get a better grasp of the wants and needs, as well as problems and liabilities of the Millennial generation, we present various extensive charts that highlight the key issues surrounding those young Americans which are gradually entering their post-college careers only to find pervasive disappointment.

First, as noted, here is the size of the Millennial generation in context:

They may be everywhere, but their job opportunities are limited, and not only in the US…

Which is also pushing the labor participation rate lower. Sorry BLS apologists: it has nothing to do with demographics and everything to do with global economic depression.

So without job opportunities, Millennials are forced to spend more and more time in a state of suspended occupational animation while hoping for better days.

Although as we noted earlier this week, record “student debt” is not just a young person problem any more: increasingly people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are crippled by loans they took out to help their professional development, which they find they simply can’t pay back.

Still, there is some hope that the college (and student debt) bubble are bursting: college admissions in the past two years have declined.

So with fewer job opportunities available to Millennials, and with virtually no wage growth to talk of (for anyone, not just the young), it is not surprising that median incomes for those in the late 20s and early 30s have stagnated, usually at the expense of those 2-3 decades older.

In fact, of all nations, America’s youth seem to be the most disadvantaged of all relative to the national average in recent years (whether Gen X and mostly the Baby Boomers are to blame is a different topic entirely.

The simplest way to show the lost income opportunity for Millennials is the following chart of median income for 25-34 year olds as a % of total:

With less disposable income, and thus fewer assets, today’s youth is finding it ever more difficult to build up a solid credit history…

… which means with less credit available, they have to save up cash for rainy days…

… and another logical outcome: fewer can afford to buy homes and start familiies, instead chosing to live in their parents’ basement…

… which assures that a Japanese style demographic collapse is just a matter of time.

It also means that the old American Dream of buying a home is increasingly impossible for most. The new American dream: renting.

To summarize the Millennial predicament: overeducated, with less disposable income and drowning in student loans. Yet like every other generation before them, they too have needs, wants and desires. In the purely materialistic realm these are the key needs as self-reported by Millennials.

The charts below summarize what they spend money on compared to all households:

Somewhat curiously, there hasn’t been a dramatic change in the distribution of household spending over the past two decades:

Still, there is a notable shift in more recent years, especially when it comes to discretionary spending and education.

They may not have much disposable income, but they do have a vocal brand preference.

And while it is unclear if today’s youth consumes fewer calories due to health reasons or simply because it can’t afford to eat as much (or simply is getting better at self-delusion when reporting consumption patterns)…

… one thing is clear: they want their cell phone…

… and their online video.

So with all that bad news, what are Millennials to do? Why drown their sorrow in booze of course. Or rather, beer: that may be all they can afford these days.

Finally, for those who want to put all this together and invest based on the above information, here is a quick snapshot from Goldman of what the bank’s preferred Millennial-inspired strategies are:

GENERATION WUSS

By Brett Easton Ellis via Vanity Fair

In February I gave an interview to Vice UK to help promote a film I had written and financed called The Canyons—I did the press because there was still the idea, the hope, that if myself or the director Paul Schrader talked about the film it would somehow find an audience interested in it and understand what it was: an experimental, guerilla DIY affair that cost $150,000 dollars to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets) and that we filmed over twenty days in L.A. during the summer of 2012 starring controversial Millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen.

The young journalist from Vice UK asked me about the usual things I was preoccupied with in that moment: my admiration of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street—the best film I saw in 2013 (not great Scorsese, but better than any other American film that year) and we talked about the movie I’m writing for Kanye West, my love of Terrence Malick (though not To The Wonder), a miniseries I was developing about the Manson murders for FOX (but because of another Manson series going into production at NBC the miniseries has now been cancelled), the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast (link), the possibility of a new novel I had begun in January of 2013 and that I lost interest in but hoped to get back to; we talked about my problems with David Foster Wallace, my love of Joan Didion, as well as Empire versus post-Empire (link) and we talked about, of course, The Canyons. But the first question the young journalist asked me wasn’t about the movie—it was about why I was always referring to Millennials as Generation Wuss on my Twitter feed. And I answered her honestly, unprepared for the level of noise my comments caused once the Vice UK piece was posted.

I have been living with someone from the Millennial generation for the last four years (he’s now 27) and sometimes I’m charmed and sometimes I’m exasperated by how him and his friends—as well as the Millennials I’ve met and interacted with both in person and in social media—deal with the world, and I’ve tweeted about my amusement and frustration under the banner “Generation Wuss” for a few years now. My huge generalities touch on their over-sensitivity, their insistence that they are right despite the overwhelming proof that suggests they are not, their lack of placing things within context, the overreacting, the passive-aggressive positivity, and, of course, all of this exacerbated by the meds they’ve been fed since childhood by over-protective “helicopter” parents mapping their every move.

These are late-end Baby Boomers and Generation X parents who were now rebelling against their own rebelliousness because of the love they felt that they never got from their selfish narcissistic Boomer parents and who end up smothering their kids, inducing a kind of inadequate preparation in how to deal with the hardships of life and the real way the world works: people won’t like you, that person may not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, life is made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And Generation Wuss responds by collapsing into sentimentality and creating victim narratives rather than acknowledging the realities of the world and grappling with them and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

I never pretended to be an expert on Millenials and my harmless tweeting about them was solely based on personal observation with the reactions to the tweets predictably running along generational lines. For example, one of the worst fights my boyfriend and I endured was about the Tyler Clemente suicide here in the United States. Clemente was an 18 year-old Rutger’s University student who killed himself because he felt he was being bullied by his roommate Dharun Ravi. Ravi never touched Tyler or threatened him but filmed Tyler making out with another man unbeknownst to Tyler and then tweeted about it. Embarrassed by this web-cam prank, Tyler threw himself off the George Washington Bridge a few days later.

The fight I had with my boyfriend was about victimization narratives and cyber-“bullying” versus imagined threats and genuine hands-on bullying. Was this just the case of an overly sensitive Generation Wuss snowflake that made national news because of how trendy the idea of cyber-bullying was in that moment (and still is to a degree) or was this a deeply troubled young person who simply snapped because he was brought down by his own shame and then was turned into a victim/hero (they are the same thing now in the United States) by a press eager to present the case out of context and turning Ravi into a monster just because of a pretty harmless—in my mind—freshman dorm-room prank? People my age tended to agree with my tweets, but people my boyfriend’s age tended to, of course, disagree.

But then again my reaction stems from the fact that I am looking at Millenials from the POV of a member of one of the most pessimistic and ironic generations that has ever roamed the earth—Generation X—so when I hear Millenials being so damaged by “cyber-bullying” that it becomes a gateway to suicide—it’s difficult for me to process. And even my boyfriend agrees that Generation Wuss is overly sensitive, especially when dealing with criticism. When Generation Wuss creates something they have so many outlets to display it that it often goes out into the world unfettered, unedited, posted everywhere, and because of this freedom a lot of the content displayed is rushed and kind of shitty and that’s OK—it’s just the nature of the world now—but when Millennials are criticized for this content they seem to collapse into a shame spiral and the person criticizing them is automatically labeled a hater, a contrarian, a troll.

And then you have to look at the generation that raised them, that coddled them in praise—gold medals for everyone, four stars for just showing up—and tried to shield them from the dark side of life, and in turn created a generation that appears to be super confident and positive about things but when the least bit of darkness enters into their realm they become paralyzed and unable to process it.

My generation was raised by Baby Boomers in a kind of complete fantasy world at the height of the Empire: Boomers were the most privileged and the best educated children of The Great Generation, enjoying the economic boom of post-World War II American society. My generation realized that like most fantasies it was a somewhat dissatisfying lie and so we rebelled with irony and negativity and attitude or conveniently just checked-out because we had the luxury to do so. Our reality compared to Millennial reality wasn’t one of economic hardship. We had the luxury to be depressed and ironic and cool. Anxiety and neediness are the defining aspects of Generation Wuss and when you don’t have the cushion of rising through the world economically then what do you rely on? Well, your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked.

And this creates its own kind of ceaseless anxiety. This is why if anyone has a snarky opinion of Generation Wuss then that person is labeled by them as a “douche”—case closed. No negativity—we just want to be admired. This is problematic because it limits discourse: if we all just like everything—the Millennial dream—then what are we going to be talking about? How great everything is? How often you’ve pressed the like button on Facebook? The Millennial site Buzzfeed has said they are no longer going to run anything negative—well, if this keeps spreading, then what’s going to happen to culture? What’s going to happen to conversation and discourse?

If there doesn’t seem to be an economic way of elevating yourself then the currency of popularity is just the norm now and so this is why you want to have thousands and thousands of people liking you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler—and you try desperately to be liked. The only way to elevate yourself in society is through your brand, your profile, your social media presence. A friend of mine—also a member of Generation Wuss—remarked that Millennials are more curators than artists, a generation of “aestheticists…any young artist who goes on Tumbler doesn’t want to create actual art—they either want to steal the art or they want to BE the art.”

I forgot about the Vice interview but was reminded of it due to a minor explosion that occurred after it was posted and the term Generation Wuss received an inordinate amount of press and I was immediately asked to appear on talk shows and podcasts and radio programs to discuss “the phenomenon” of Generation Wuss. The people who agreed with my casual, tossed-off assessments skewed older but I was surprised by the number of young people who agreed with me as well, Millennials who also had complaints about their generation.

The older people wanted to share examples: a father related a story how he remembered watching in frustration as his son participated in a tug-of-war game with his classmates on the field of his elementary school and after a minute or two the well-meaning coach announced the game was officially a tie, told the kids they did a great job, and everyone got a ribbon. Occasionally there were darker stories: guilt-ridden parents chastising themselves for coddling kids who when finally faced with the normal reality of the world drifted into drugs as an escape…from the normal reality of the world. Parents kept reaching out and told me they were tormented by this oppressive need to reward their kids constantly in this culture. That in doing so they effectively debilitated them from dealing with the failures we all confront as get older, and that their children were unequipped to deal with pain.

I didn’t appear on any of the talk shows because I don’t pretend to be an expert on this generation any more than I feel I’m an expert on my own: I don’t feel like that old man complaining about the generation supplanting his. As someone who throughout his own career satirized my generation for their materialism and their shallowness, I didn’t think that pointing out aspects I noticed in Millennials was that big of a deal. But in the way that the 24-48 hour news cycle plays itself out I briefly was considered an “expert” and I kept getting bombarded with emails and tweets.

What the Vice interview didn’t allow was that because I’ve been living with someone from this generation I’m sympathetic to them as well, remembering clearly the hellish year my college-educated boyfriend looked for a job and could only find non-paying internships. Add in the demeaning sexual atmosphere that places a relentless emphasis on good looks (Tinder being the most prevalent example) in such a superficially nightmarish way it makes the way my generation hooked-up seem positively chaste and innocent by comparison.

So I’m sympathetic to Generation Wuss and their neurosis, their narcissism and their foolishness—add the fact that they were raised in the aftermath of 9/11, two wars, a brutal recession and it’s not hard to be sympathetic. But maybe in the way Lena Dunham is in “Girls” a show that perceives them with a caustic and withering eye and is also sympathetic. And this is crucial: you can be both. In-fact in order to be an artist, to raise yourself above the din in an over-reactionary fear-based culture that considers criticism elitist, you need to be both. But this is a hard thing to do because Millennials can’t deal with that kind of cold-eye reality. This is why Generation Wuss only asks right now : please, please, please, only give positive feedback please.

THANK THINKER FOR ANOTHER MILLENNIAL POST

Here is everything you ever wanted to know (or not know) about Millennials but were afraid to ask. This link leads to a blog of a generational conference held earlier today that included Neil Howe.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/07/live-blog-generations-in-the-next-america/

You can thank Thinker for all the fireworks to follow.

6 new findings about Millennials

By Bruce Drake

America is in the throes of a huge demographic shift, and a major factor in this sea change is the Millennial generation, which is forging its own distinct path to adulthood compared with older Americans. Our new survey illustrates the differences between these 18- to 33- year-olds and their elders. Here are key takeaways:

1. Millennials have fewer attachments to traditional political and religious institutions, but they connect to personalized networks of friends, colleagues and affinity groups through social and digital media. Half of Millennials now describe themselves as political independents and 29% are not affiliated with any religion—numbers that are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the last quarter-century.

2. Millennials are more burdened by financial hardships than previous generations, but they’re optimistic about the future. Millennials are the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations had at the same age. Yet, they are extremely confident about their financial future. More than eight-in-ten say they currently have enough money to lead the lives they want or expect to in the future.

3. Singlehood sets Millennials apart from other generations. Just 26% of Millennials are married. When they were the age that Millennials are now, 36% of Gen Xers, 48% of Baby Boomers and 65% of the members of the Silent Generation were married. Most unmarried Millennials (69%) say they would like to marry, but many, especially those with lower levels of income and education, lack what they deem to be a necessary prerequisite—a solid economic foundation.

4. Millennials are the most racially diverse generation in American history. Some 43% of Millennial adults are non-white, the highest share of any generation. A major factor behind this trend is the large wave of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who have been coming to the U.S. for the past half century, and whose U.S.-born children are now aging into adulthood. The racial makeup of today’s young adults is one of the key factors—though not the only one—in explaining their political liberalism.

5. Millennials are less trusting of others than older Americans are. Asked a long-standing social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” just 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents and 40% of Boomers.

6. Few Millennials believe that Social Security will provide them with full benefits when they are ready to retire, but most oppose cutting current benefits as a way to fix the system. About half (51%) of Millennials believe they will get no benefits from Social Security and 39% predict they will get benefits at reduced levels. However, much like older adults, 61% of Millennials oppose benefit cuts as a way to address the long-term funding problems of Social Security.

BOOMERS STILL SCREWING MILLENNIALS

This info obliterates the MSM meme that the millions leaving the work force are retiring Boomers. They can’t retire because they haven’t saved a fucking dime for retirement. They were busy spending on McMansions, leasing BMWs, going on fine vacations, and buying electronic gadgets. They will work until the massive coronary hits due to their obesity from sitting in a recliner for the last forty years munching cheetos. Meanwhile, millennials won’t get a chance to use their mad math skills from the common core curriculum, after taking on $50,000 of student loan debt and getting no jobs. But at least they’ve got Obamacare.

Record Jobs For Old Workers; Everyone Else – Better Luck Next Month

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/07/2014 10:28 -05000

We have long been pounding the table (certainly since mid-2012) that the US labor market has become a place where mostly older workers – those 55 and over – are hirable – something which has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with excess worker slack, and an employer’s market to pick and chose those workers that are most qualified for a job since older workers have the same wage leverage as younger ones: none. February was merely the latest confirmation of just this.

The chart below shows the age breakdown of the various age groups of workers hired in the past month. The vast majority, or 239K of the job gains(according to the Household survey), once again fell into the oldest group, those aged 55-69. The core demographic, those 25-54, rose by a negligible 29K. Everyone else, i.e., those 16-24, saw a total of 153K in job losses.

The good news (for them, and bad news for everyone else): the number of workers aged 55 and over just hit a fresh all time record high:

And finally, here is the full breakdown of “young vs old” jobs since the start of the Depression in December 2007: those 55 and older have gained 4.9 million jobs. Those under 55 are still some 3.1 million jobs below their December 2007 level.

WISDOM OF A MILLENNIAL

Another comment so good, it deserved its own post. We sure attract smart, well-spoken people to this site. Rose, a millenial, provides some wisdom beyond her years.

For context, I am a Millenial. MY husband is a Gen Xer.

My husband was 16 when his dad died. His family did not have a lot of money and 6 kids to care for. Other than his dad’s social security, which was meager because his jobs were not very high pay, they did not get any outside assistance at any time. He quit school to work days. He finished high school at night and then went on to the community college night classes, while working on a farm 6 or 7 days a week, doing heavy, heavy manual labor and then coming home to study. He paid cash for his education, going when he had the money to pay for it. It took him 8 years to pull it off but he has a degree and it helped land him a managerial job on a farm, a good enough job to allow us to buy a home, own 2 cars outright and have me stay home with our child.

By all rights, when his dad passed he could have jumped on the “poor pitiful me” modern victimhood bandwagon but he is a man and real men don’t do that. I am, as you might guess, more than a little bit proud of the guy. He is a rock. I would walk through hell if he was next to me.

His story and countless others like it prove that it CAN be done. It just takes a LOT of sweat and sacrifice. Whining does not buy you anything but annoyed listeners. If carrying 70 pound cabbage boxes in the blazing sun is what it takes to get ahead, you do it. The only alternative is a lifetime of servitude and self loathing.

I will admit, it is NOT easy to get traction in this environment. We have lost a disgusting amount of money trying to invest in traditional methods as advised by my well intentioned Boomer parents. We got walloped in 2008 and have only just now regained what we lost. Which is maddening because we worked so hard to save what little we had invested. To see it all just melt away was heartbreaking. It also woke us up. Fool us once….

What worked for the Boomers doesn’t work for us. It might never work again. But what my great-grandparents did DOES work. Buy yourself some Horatio Alger and read it like a manual.

We bought a small-ish, 160 year old rural house with some acreage. It needed work but had good bones. You could build a battleship with its oak beams. We can pay the mortgage with one income, and we went for a short mortgage to get rid of it as soon as possible. We have restored it to a working farmhouse. It is clean and neat but not trendy. Screw Martha Stewart if she thinks curing sweet potatoes on racks in the living room is not tasteful.

We dug up most of the lawn and put in a huge garden and fruit trees and bushes and I can hundreds of jars of food a year. We built a chicken coop for meat and eggs. I am trying to talk him into hogs for the back pasture. The idea of homemade bacon almost has him convinced. We buy grassfed beef from a local farm and get a deal because my husband works for them on the side for a break.

I stay at home and am a traditional housewife. This means cooking from scratch, cleaning and repairing things myself and squeezing every penny until it begs for mercy. We do not have cable or dish or cell phones. We line dry laundry on all but the worst of days. Our furniture is antiques that we buy broken and restore. It will last a lifetime. We borrow our entertainment for the library and buy our books at booksales. On the side, for pin money, to keep my brain busy and to fund our homeschooling, I sell excess vintage kids books.

Life is a lot of work but we have truly good and healthy food, a warm, welcoming home, good friends of like mind and a beautiful little girl. We have what matters.

Why am I saying all of this? Because it illustrates a very important principle: you can spend time, or you can spend money. Money is hard to come by, and what you do get Uncle Sugar will steal. Time, on the other hand, if well managed, is plentiful. By raising our own, making from scratch and restoring other people’s castoffs, we use time but save money. I have a good degree and could be working outside the home, but it would be taxable. By my being a stay at home housewife providing many of our basic needs we dodge that, as well as the expenses of childcare and work clothes and mileage on the car. And it lets us homeschool, which frees our daughter from the shackles of public indoctrination. Manual labor for ourselves frees our limited money up for other things. Things like starting a business, which we are working on.

If you want to invest, invest in yourself. Build a foundation that your family can grow on. Forget the snake oil they sell you about retirement. It is nothing but a rat race to get you to forfeit money now, make it unavailable, and then go into debt for things you could have paid cash for if you’d had access to your own money. Invest in solid things, pay off your debts and raise your kids right. And by that, I mean raise them as the Amish do, to pick up where you leave off, to provide comfort to you in old age as you provide them comfort in youth. Be a tribe. Love and family are our strongest weapons. Why else do you think TPTB do their damndest to turn us away from these?

It is true, it IS hard that resources cost so much, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it to get yourself to where you want to be. Give up what you can, do for yourself what you can, and pay the bloodmoney for what you must have.

There are more than few of us Xers and Minnies who see things this way. A lot of us rediscovering old crafts, skills and values and forgoing the i-crazes. Don’t write us all off. There is still backbone in some of us.

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

A confluence of events last week has me reminiscing about the days gone by and apprehensive about the future. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my adulthood rushing to baseball fields, hockey rinks, gymnasiums, and school auditoriums after a long day at work. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment. Watching eight year olds trying to throw a strike for two hours can become excruciatingly mind-numbing. But, the years of baseball, hockey, basketball, and band taught my boys life lessons about teamwork, sportsmanship, winning, losing, hard work, and having fun. There were championship teams, awful teams and of course trophies for finishing in 7^th place. As my boys have gotten older and no longer participate in organized sports, the time commitment has dropped considerably. Last week was one of those few occasions where I had to rush home from work, wolf down a slice of pizza and head out to a school function. It was the annual 8^th grade Spring concert.

My youngest son was one of a hundred kids in the 8^th grade choir. I think it was mandatory, since none of my kids like to sing. As my wife and I found a seat in the back of the auditorium where we could make a quick escape at the conclusion of the show, neither of us were enthused with the prospect of spending the next ninety minutes listening to off-key music and lame songs. I’ve been jaded by sitting through these ordeals since pre-school. But a funny thing happened during my 30^th band concert. I began to feel sentimental about the past and sorrowful about the future for these Millennials.

The Millennial generation was born between 1982 and 2004. Therefore, they range in age from 9 years old to 31 years old. There are approximately 87 million of them, or 27.5% of the U.S. population. In comparison, the much ballyhooed Boomer generation only has 65 million cohorts remaining on this earth. The Millennials will have a much greater influence on the direction of this country over the next fifteen years than the currently in control Boomers. There has been abundant scorn heaped upon this young generation by their elders. In a fit of irrationality befit the arrogant, hubristic, delusional elder generations, they somehow blame a cohort in which 54 million of them are still younger than 21 years old for many of the ills afflicting our society. This disgusting display of hubris is par for the course among these delusional elders.

Are Millennials addicted to their iGadgets, cell phones and Facebook pages? Probably. Do they spend too much time on the internet and playing PS3 & Xbox? Certainly. Have they been indoctrinated in social engineering gibberish like diversity and planet worship by government run public school bureaucrats? Absolutely. Are they young, foolish, immature, irrational and not respectful towards their elders? You betcha. Teenagers have acted like this forever. You acted like that. The ongoing crisis in this country and our unsustainable economic system are in no way the result of anything perpetrated by the Millennial generation.

Can the Millennial generation be blamed for the $17 trillion national debt, $222 trillion of unfunded un-payable social obligations promised by corrupt politicians, $1 trillion of annual deficits, undeclared wars being waged across the globe on behalf of the military industrial complex arms dealer mega-corporations, economic policies that have resulted in 48 million people dependent on food stamps, tax policies that enrich those who write the code, trade policies that benefit corporations who gutted the industrial base and shipped jobs overseas to slave labor factories, or monetary policies that have destroyed 96% of the dollar’s purchasing power? They had no say in the creation of our untenable welfare/warfare state.

There are no Millennials among the 535 corrupt bought off politicians slithering down the halls of Congress. There are no Millennials running the Too Big To Control Wall Street banks. There are no Millennials in charge of the mega-corporations that buy and sell our politicians. There are no Millennials at the upper echelon of the Military Industrial Complex or in the upper ranks of the U.S. Military. But, and this is a big but, they have done most of the dying in the Middle East over the last ten years in our multiple undeclared preemptive wars of aggression. They have died under the false pretenses of a War on Terror, when they are truly dying on behalf of the crony capitalists who profit from never ending war. They have been fighting and dying to protect “our oil” that happens to be under “their sand”. If the energy independence storyline was true, why is our military perpetually at war in the Middle East?

The Millennials will also be required to do the heavy lifting over the next fifteen years of this Fourth Turning Crisis. The Silent Generation is dying off rapidly. The Boomer generation has done some hard living and some hefty eating and with the oldest of their cohort hitting 70 years old, their supremacy will begin to diminish over the coming fifteen years. At 87 million strong, and millions yet to reach voting age, the Millennials will become more influential by the day regarding the future course of this nation. The question is what will be left of this country by the time they assume control. They are saddled with $1 trillion of student loan debt, peddled to them by the government and Wall Street with the false promise of good paying jobs and the opportunity for a better life than their parents lived. They have obediently followed the path laid out by their elders, but they have been badly misled. This American dream has been shattered upon an iceberg of debt, delusion, deception and denial. The unsinkable American empire’s hubris and arrogance are leading to its demise. The Millennials are coming of age during a Crisis that will reach momentous magnitudes over the next fifteen years, and they had nothing to do with creating the circumstances which will propel the chaos and anarchy that ensues. But, they will bear the brunt of the dreadful consequences.

Generational Bridge

“The Boomers’ old age will loom, exposing the thinness in private savings and the unsustainability of public promises. The 13ers will reach their make or break peak earning years, realizing at last that they can’t all be lucky exceptions to their stagnating average income. Millennials will come of age facing debts, tax burdens, and two tier wage structures that older generations will now declare intolerable.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The kids on the stage at the 8^th grade Spring concert were all around 14 years old. They are unaware they are in the midst of a twenty year period of Crisis. The boys are at that gawky looking stage with pimply faces and gawky limbs. The girls mature quicker than the boys at that age. These youngsters have barely begun their lives. I was amazed at their proficiency with a wide variety of musical instruments. They displayed poise and talent. The soloists exhibited composure well beyond their years. The performers were all musically endowed and proved that hard work and practice pays off. They were clearly enjoying themselves. They were all dressed in their Sunday best. I found myself enjoying the show despite my jaded attitude upon entering the auditorium. Even my son, wearing one of my ties, actually appeared to be singing during the choir performance. What I saw were hundreds of bright eyed Millennials with their hopes and dreams for a bright future intact. They have no idea what trials and tribulations await them.

I reached a milestone on the age chart last week that had me ruminating about yesteryear and contemplating the future. I reached the half century mark. Birthdays generally do not faze me, but the intersection of the 8^th grade concert and my landmark birthday had me pondering my purpose for inhabiting this world. I’ve likely realized two-thirds of my life. The final third of my life will be spent trying to maneuver through the minefields of this Fourth Turning. I’m a father to three Millennial boys. I consider it my duty to defend and support them during this Crisis. Strauss & Howe wrote their book in 1997 and predicted a Great Devaluation in the financial markets around the time Millennials were entering their twenties. This Crisis began in September 2008 with the worldwide financial collapse created by Wall Street “Greed is Good” Boomers, as the oldest Millennials entered their twenties. It continues to worsen as more Millennials approach their twenties. We’ve reached a point in history when the elder generations need to sacrifice in order to insure younger generations have a chance at some form of the American dream.

I believe each generation has an obligation to future generations. We are bridge between preceding generations and future generations. We have a civic obligation to manage the resources of the country in a prudent manner. It’s our duty to leave the country in a financially viable condition so younger generations have an opportunity to live a better life than their parents. Every generation that preceded the Millennials has achieved the goal of having a better standard of living than their parents. I don’t believe my boys will enjoy a better life than I’ve lived. We’ve lived well beyond our means for decades. Government, Wall Street banks, corporations and individuals have run up a $56 trillion tab and are sticking the Millennials with the bill.

The $17 trillion national debt accumulated by elder generations to benefit themselves and $222 trillion of unfunded entitlements promised to themselves is nothing but generational theft. It’s immoral and possibly the most selfish act in human history. I’m ashamed that my generation and older generations have committed this criminal act of theft. Deficit spending today with no intention of repaying that debt is a tax on future generations. This egotistical abuse of power by the current and past regimes must be reversed voluntarily or it will be done by force. I’m 50 years old and will dedicating my remaining time on this earth fighting to create a sustainable future for my kids and their kids. The lucky among us get eighty years on this planet to make a difference. When did the definition of success become dying with the most toys and spending your life screwing your fellow man by accumulating obscene levels of wealth at their expense? If Boomers and Generation X have any sense of guilt about what they have done, they would be willingly offering to sacrifice their ill-gotten entitlements.

Not only are those currently in power not proposing to scale back their spending, debt accumulation, or entitlement transfers, but they have accelerated the pace of each in the last five years. An already unsustainable corrupted economic structure is being driven towards collapse by psychopathic central bankers and cowardly captured politicians. These are acts of treason against the youth of this country and larceny on a grand scale. It will lead to generational warfare and these crooks will pay for their transgressions. Strauss & Howe suspected in 1997 the elders might cling to their illicit profits acquired at the expense of the Millennials:

“When young adults encounter leaders who cling to the old regime (and who keep propping up senior benefit programs that will by then be busting the budget), they will not tune out, 13er – style. Instead, they will get busy working to defeat or overcome their adversaries. Their success will lead some older critics to perceive real danger in a rising generation perceived as capable but naïve.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The elders who represent the status quo do perceive real danger in the rising Millennial generation. The initial skirmishes occurred in the midst of the Occupy protests. The young protestors initially focused on the true culprits in the crashing of the financial system and vaporizing of the net worth of millions – Wall Street bankers and their sugar daddy at the Federal Reserve. In a display of status quo bipartisanship you had liberal Democrat mayors in cities across the country call out their armed thugs to beat the millennial protestors into submission while being cheered on by Fox News and the neo-cons.

The existing status quo regime provides the illusion of choice, but both political parties are interchangeable in their desire to control our lives, flex our military might around the globe, indebt future generations and write laws to favor their corporate and banking masters. The establishment is showing contempt for the futures of our youth. Their solutions to the criminally created financial crisis have been to reward reckless debtors and bankers at the expense of future generations. Their doling out of hundreds of billions in student loan debt and artificial propping up of home prices has effectively made it impossible for millions of young people to get their lives started. Boomers have done such a poor job saving for their retirements they are unable to leave the workforce. Since January 2009, despite adding $400 billion of student loan debt, Millennials have a net loss in jobs, while the Boomers have taken 4 million jobs.

Strauss & Howe anticipated that older people would be anguished to see good kids suffer for the mistakes they had made. They thought the elders couldn’t possibly be shallow enough, selfish enough, or immoral enough to deny the Millennial generation a chance at the American Dream. They were wrong. The old regime has no plans to step aside or sacrifice on behalf of younger generations. The implications of this resistance will be dire.

“The youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millennial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues. The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20% of Millennials who were poor as children (50% in inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The social mood in this country continues to deteriorate as the sociopathic financial elite accelerate their pillaging of the working middle class, steal money from senior citizens through zero interest rate inflationary policies, and enslave our youth in the chains of crushing debt and promise of dead end jobs. When the next leg down in this ongoing depression strikes like an F5 tornado, the simmering anger in this country will explode in a chaotic frenzy of violence and retribution. The chances of class and generational warfare have increased exponentially due to the actions of the elderly regime over the last five years.

Generational Sacrifice

“You got your whole life ahead of you, but for me, I finish things.” – Walt Kowalski – Gran Torino

A couple days after the Spring concert I was flipping through the 650 channels on my TV with nothing worth watching when I stumbled across the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. This was the third episode within the week that had me thinking about the future of my kids. It was his highest grossing film in history. Eastwood played a bigoted tough guy Korean War veteran whose Detroit suburban neighborhood had deteriorated into a dangerous gang infested Asian war zone. The movie did not follow the standard Eastwood plot where he kills dozens of bad guys. He grudgingly befriends two young Millennial teenage Laos refugees who live next door. He had lost his wife of 50 years. He was in his 70s and dying from some undiagnosed illness. I viewed the movie as an allegory for the generational sacrifice that should be taking place now.

Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowlaski, decided to finish things his way. He realized the two Millennials would never find peace or have a chance at a better life until the criminal gang running the show in the neighborhood were confronted and defeated. He knew he was too old to kill six gang members singlehandedly, so he made a choice to sacrifice himself and be gunned down in cold blood in front of multiple witnesses so the perpetrators would go to jail and allow his Millennial companions to have a chance at a better life. He sacrificed his life for the good of young people who weren’t even related to him. This message has not connected with the elder generations who control the purse strings and political system in this country. The media propaganda machine supporting the existing regime continues to peddle a storyline that debt doesn’t matter, consumption is good, saving is for suckers, and passing the bill for unfunded entitlements to future generations is not immoral and cowardly. Walt Kowalski displayed courage, bravery, and valor that is sorely lacking in the elderly generations today.

At the age of 50 I have a choice with my remaining 20 or 30 years. I can choose to keep accumulating material goods with debt, voting for politicians who promise never to cut my entitlements, believing deficits growing to infinity are beneficial to the economic health of the nation, supporting the military industrial complex as they wage undeclared wars across the world, applauding the Orwellian fascist surveillance measures instituted to give the illusion of safety while sacrificing freedoms and liberties and selfishly looking out for my best interests. Or I can stand up to the corporate fascist old boy regime and lure them into a violent response that will ultimately lead to their downfall. I’m willing to sacrifice what is supposedly “owed” to me on behalf of my kids and all Millennials. They don’t deserve to start life in a $200 trillion hole created by their parents and grandparents. It is disconcerting to me that more Boomer and Generation X parents are unprepared, unwilling or too willfully ignorant to forfeit entitlements awarded them under false pretenses in order to preserve a decent standard of living for their children and grandchildren. The Bernaysian propaganda programmed into their brains over decades by the sociopathic central planning status quo has created this inertia.

The inertia will be replaced by frenzied activity when this unsustainable system ultimately fails. Time seems to be standing still. People have been lulled into a false sense of security even though history is about to fling us into a chaotic transformational period in history. How do I know this is going to happen? Because it happens every eighty years like clockwork. The best laid plans of the men running the show will be swept away in a whirl of pandemonium, violence, war and reckoning for sins committed against humanity. There will be no escape.

“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance. The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Our country has entered a period of Crisis. We may or may not successfully navigate our way through the visible icebergs and more dangerous icebergs just below the surface. The similarities between the course of our country and the maiden voyage of the Titanic are eerily allegorical.

The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) are arrogant and reckless. They declare the ship unsinkable, while only providing half the lifeboats needed to save all the passengers in case of disaster in order to maximize their profits. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has been tendered the greatest cruise liner (United States) in history. The initial voyage across the Atlantic Ocean has drawn the financial elite ruling class (financers & bankers) onboard, occupying the luxurious state rooms on the upper decks. But, the lower decks are filled with young poor peasants (Millennials) who are sneered at and ridiculed by those in the upper decks. A maiden voyage should always be approached cautiously. A prudent captain would not take undue risks.

Our captain (Ben Bernanke) wants to make his mark on history. He considers himself an expert in navigating dangerous waters (Great Depression) because he studied dangerous waters at his Ivy League school. It doesn’t matter that he never actually captained a ship in the real world. He declares full steam ahead (reducing interest rates to 0% and throwing vast amounts of fiat currency into the engine room boilers). Midway through the voyage, the captain is handed a telegram warning of icebergs (potential financial catastrophe) ahead. If he slows down the vessel, he will not set the speed record and receive the accolades of an adoring public. He ignores the warning and steams on to his rendezvous (eternal disgrace) with destiny.

In the middle of the night, the lookouts (Ron Paul, John Hussman, Zero Hedge) cry iceberg!! But, it is too late. The great ship (United States) has struck an enormous iceberg (debt & currency crisis). At first, it seems like everything will be OK. The captain and crew assure the passengers that everything is under control and their evasive action has saved the ship. But below the waterline, the great ship (United States) is taking on water (toxic levels of debt, un-payable entitlement promises, trillion dollar deficits, political & financial corruption). The engine room (Federal Reserve) works frantically to alleviate the damage (QE to infinity). The captain is sure the compartmentalization of the ship will save it. One of the designers of the ship (David Stockman) sadly declares that the ship will surely sink. The captain orders the band (CNBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN) on deck to distract the passengers from their impending fate with soothing music. The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) aren’t worried. They collected their fees upfront and over-insured the vessel. They anticipate a windfall when the ship sinks. It worked last time.

To avoid mass panic, the crew (government apparatchiks) has locked the youthful poor peasants (Millennials) below deck. The captain and his crew are content to let them go down with the ship. They’ve decided the women, children, and senior citizens (Middle Class) can also be sacrificed. The financial elite ruling class (financers and bankers) are piling into the boats with the ship’s jewels, escaping the fate of the peasants. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has no intention of going down with the ship. In a cowardly act, he leaps onto the 1st lifeboat to be launched. We are on a voyage of the damned. The great cruise liner (United States) has a fatal wound and is headed for a watery grave. Are we going to let the owners, captain and crew dictate who will be saved in the few lifeboats or will we rise up and throw these guilty parties overboard?

It comes down to the abuse of power by a few evil men and their henchmen as they have centralized their control over our financial, political, economic and social institutions. The existing social order is an ancient, rotting, fetid swamp of parasites that will be drained during this Fourth Turning. The Millennials are rising and will be the spearhead of the coming revolution. As each day passes they will become a more powerful force and the power of the existing regime will wane. Meanwhile, the band will play on as the ship of state descends into the abyss.