Median wages for today’s new college graduates are higher than they were for Boomers when they graduated, and more people get degrees now. They are also higher than they were for people who graduated in the early to mid-'90s. The only new grads to ever do better in American history are from a narrow slice of the population on the border of GenX and Millennials, who are currently in their mid-to-late thirties.
If you go back and look at Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which gave the generation its name, the central conceit was that it was GenXers who had been screwed by Boomers in a game of economic musical chairs. Then came the big '90s boom, and that pessimism was forgotten. Similarly, this latest round of bellyaching is going to look very silly in retrospect, but this time people like me will easily be able to dig up these threads and gloat in our “told you sos”.
For fuck’s sake, why are you a Democrat? You might as well be Ayn Rand at this point. Certainly you are no better then say our Likudnik friend DerekMichael00 or GloryDays.
So, as a centrist myself, here is my problem with this. I’m not a boomer, but am old enough that I got a piece of the dot com boom at the right time.
If you are an urban minority high schooler, your chances of not graduating from high school are around 50%. This isn’t millennials that aren’t getting a shot at the workforce because they don’t go to college, this is KIDS who don’t get a chance at the workforce because someone put them on the school to prison path back in third grade.
If your an urban minority young man, your chances of getting shot are much higher - I think its still the leading cause of death for young black men. They are much higher if its a cop doing the shooting or a gang member - doesn’t matter whose shooting, you aren’t safe.
If you are a poor minority - or even just poor - your voting rights are being eroded.
If you are a woman, we’ve had more than 400 new restrictions on abortion in this country in the past decade. They happen at a state level - the President can’t do anything about them - except appoint Supreme Court justices who will strike down these laws. We’ve been promising paid family leave, increases to subsidized daycare.
If you are elderly, we’ve seen changes to Medicare, a bogus prescription drug coverage bill, and minimal increases to Social Security.
We managed to get a half assed fix for health insurance in, we need to make it better
We’ve been promising to fix this for women, the elderly, minorities and the poor for a long time - get in line millennials.
You seem to be saying that what matters is not generational but class relations, defining “class” in terms of relative political influence, i.e., women have less of it than men. Well, Sanders’ progressivism is all about empowering the powerless.
This article was not where I originally got my info (it was from some BLS graphs I’m having trouble re-finding at the moment), but I’d say it very nicely corresponds with my claim that:
People who were “freshly minted graduates” in 2003 (one of the “best years on record”) would be mostly be around 35-37 now. It’s implied that 2003 was the end of those “best years on record”, so that fits even better (except that it might include some people who are now 40 or 41, but close enough I’d say).
You have a rep as some kind of rhetorical genius, who just needs to tame your muse a bit. But lazy hyperbole like this does not burnish your image, to say the least. It does however illustrate precisely the problem I’ve been pointing to. Anyone a titch or two closer to the center than Bernie is suddenly Dick Cheney (or Ayn Rand).
I don’t know if you watch Bill Maher’s “Real Time” or listen to the free podcast of the audio, but I wonder what you did or would make of the things Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said on the most recent episode. Not only did he tout the current strength of the economy and its trajectory, he repeatedly mocked the “Eeyore caucus” (he used this term at least three times) who keep talking about the economy as though it’s in bad shape. This caucus, he said, “could win the lottery on Friday and they’d complain the bank isn’t open until Monday”.
But as ridiculous as your “why are you even a Democrat?” question is, I don’t want to appear to be ducking a direct answer. I’m a Democrat because:
–I consider every Democratic president to serve in the past eighty years to have ranged from good to great, while the Republican presidents over that same period of time have ranged from mediocre to awful;
–I loved or at least liked just about everything Pelosi and Reid passed, and President Obama signed, in the first two years of his presidency;
–I loathed or at least disliked just about everything Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, and Bill Frist passed, and President Bush signed, during the two stretches of his presidency when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress;
–Nearly every time a major Supreme Court decision comes out, I seem to find myself agreeing with the way the Democratic appointees vote, and disagreeing with the way the Republican appointees vote (with the odd exception in the cases of Roberts and Kennedy).
Those would seem to combine to paint a portrait of someone perfectly at home in the Democratic Party.
As for Ayn Rand, I share her atheism but precious little else.
So all in all, your jibe seems spectacularly ill-aimed. :dubious:
The two million more people who have voted for Clinton than Sanders who aren’t millionaires - African Americans, Latinos, naturalized citizens, women over 40.
Yes, Hillary Clinton has received more primary votes than any other candidate, Republican or Democrat.
No way will it be silly. If we had a decent bipartisan approach to economic stabilization, the soft economy would have ended in 2011 or 2012. There’s been a lot of unnecessary hardship for wholly unnecessary reasons. And we still haven’t laid the groundwork for dealing with the next downturn.
The 99% and the 1% should be able to agree that an expanding economy helps everyone and is more pleasant to live in.
But many of those have voted for Sanders, and, as noted above, he has won some working-class support and labor-union endorsements. All of these sectors would line up behind him with little hesitation if he won the nomination – at least in preference to Trump/Cruz.
As for the assertion you quoted, “The top 25% of young college graduates earn at least $60,000 a year,” even if so, “the bottom 25 percent of college degree holders basically earn no more than the median worker who ended his or her education after high school” according to a couple of studies.
In fact, your cite that I cannot read is from The New York Fed, author of the study that Slate is reporting.
So a sizable minority of people with bachelor degrees have little to show for it, save for the crushing and ever-increasing school loans which you didn’t even respond to.
Huh, it wasn’t behind a paywall when I looked at it.
I’m not surprised the bottom tier of college grads do poorly. We’ve got too many people going to college, and too many subpar colleges. I know guys in the building trades who make decent money and instead of teaching their skills to their kids the way had been done for umpteen generations before, they used their money to send their kids to college where they flunked out after racking up debt, or got mediocre grades at mediocre schools and eked out degrees that aren’t worth much. Meanwhile, if one of my pipes springs a leak or I need my roof patched, it’s insanely hard to find someone to work on it because they all have more work than they can handle.
And yes, student loans are a problem, including for my family. Colleges are competing with each other to offer the best amenities, when what they really should be doing is getting rid of the leafy quads, fancy rec centers, and Georgian architecture, not to mention top-heavy administrative structures, and putting all their funding toward actual classroom learning. Hire high quality professors and pay them well. If they are teaching something like chemistry that requires good lab facilities, make sure they have it. If they are teaching other subjects, make sure they have comfortable seats and good computer/AV equipment, but otherwise just stack up the classrooms in metal sheds.
The answer is not certainly just to open up the funding spigots and send even more people to college as it is structured now, I guarantee you that much.
I was really impressed by how Samantha Bee took on Bernie Bros tonight. I’d consider this a very brave tack, given that her audience is likely to skew very heavily in the Bernhead direction. I hope their righteous fury doesn’t prove to be too much of a headache for her.
:rolleyes: This is akin to the dumb argument that some conservatives/libertarians attempt to use when they say the “US is not a democracy, it’s a democratic republic”. Yes, Sanders is pushing a particular brand of (mild) socialism but it’s still under the umbrella of socialism. In the vernacular plenty of people call Bernie a (unqualified) socialist. Besides, Bernie at times calls himself an (unqualified) socialist. Politifact has this to say:
*We wondered: Were we being inaccurate when we described him as a socialist?
The short answer: It’s akin to calling a honeycrisp an apple — not the most specific description, but not inaccurate. And here’s the kicker: Despite what he calls himself, Sanders isn’t exactly an apple, either.
Sanders’ campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But we found many examples of Sanders describing himself as a democratic socialist, a specific type of socialist who wants public ownership of the means of production (which means the tools and money to make things) and a democratic political system.
But he’s also called himself just a socialist.
That’s because, like Sanders, most democratic socialists use the terms interchangeably, said Joseph Schwartz, vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.*
(My emphasis.)