Provide you with free travel to exotic lands, so you can see all of the historic sights and kill the locals without having to worry about the ICC.
I’ve been watching this thread, fully expecting SOMEBODY to make with the juvenile joke.
I recall that, in my college years, I spent a lot of time chasing Bush…
Many of my friends are/where in the software industry. You’re in a real brutal line of work. You’re lucky to pick up a job in the same industry and your Home Depot anology is accurate. However, your own example does not relate to a “bad” economy. A bad economy would leave you jobless.
I do not live in a vacuum. I know many people who have lost their jobs. Some get better paying jobs, some get lesser paying jobs. It’s more likely that a change of job in a related field will result in lesser pay because you are starting over. That’s the inevitable result of recession and job loss.
My own company was bought out today by a larger company. My immediate future is unknown. Since I started planning for this day over 10 years ago I’m not in panic mode but that doesn’t mean I don’t empathize with those who have lost their jobs.
I wish you well in your endeavors.
Some of us have higher standards than that, Magiver. A “Do-you-want-fries-with-that?” economy is not a thriving economy.
This is why we don’t use personal experiences as citations to back up arguments about the economy at large.
The economy at large is an easy thing to see. The country, economically, is doing super great. Money’s moving. Inflation is low. Unemployment is only about 6%. What, then, is the problem? The problem is that it’s you (or you or you) that’s enemployed – not him.
Okay, we’ve lost manufacturing jobs, but that’s been happening for 20 years. No one thought the USA was coming to an end. But now what we’re losing are information systems jobs. That’s software engineers. Systems people. Programmers. Jobs that any intelligent person can learn for very low cost. The rest of the world figured this out, and can undersell us now. No one was complaining when Visual Basic programmers were clearing over $100,000 per year. Why now all of a sudden?
There’s still a lot of traditional engineering that’s not suffered an exodus.
What we don’t see are massive amount of people on the street begging. We don’t see a huge increase in the number of soup kitchens. The “poverty” rate in the USA still rivals the middle class in lots of other countries.
What we do see everywhere is new construction. Expensive homes. New shopping centers. Urban sprawl is expensive, but someone’s got the money to support it. Restaurants are packed, even bad ones like Outback make you wait in line and overcharge you. These are not rich people going to these places! These are our friends and neighbors.
Where’s the crisis at? What percentage of the population is “suffering”? What percentage was suffering five years ago?
Well, thanks, but I want to make it clear I’m not trying to make an emotional argument (a la "I was unemployed, I dare you to tell me the economy’s not bad). After all, I was the one who brought up that I was out of work for a while - it’s fair game if there’s a point to be made.
Having said that, I think you and have a very different opinion on what constitutes a good economy. Underemployment, and employment lower on the scale are important - that’s one of the (valid) points I think Kerry’s been making - GDP is increasing, but the middle class is falling behind as the rich get richer.
Let’s narrow that a little, Balthisar. For purposes of this thread, the really relevant question is, are this Administration and this economy good or bad for college students? Is the Admin going to help them out with tuition, etc., more or less than a Kerry Admin would? And – what kind of job prospects are they going to face when they graduate under a Bush Admin, as opposed to a Kerry Admin? How hard is it going to be for a young person just starting out to reach the bottom rung of any career ladder?
You and I agree. I should have wrapped [Ironic argument] tags around my post.
You and I disagree. Middle-class income is shrinking, and increases in employment haven’t kept pace with people entering the job force. Inflation is some areas (health care) is staggering, further eroding real income that families see.
Since others are arguing about what Bush may do for the economy you will graduate into, I’ll cover your years in college:
Not much.
But then I am not sure Kerry has plans to, either.
Bush has been working to marginally increase the Pell Grant, which might help you, and would certainly help some of the students you attend college with, but he hasn’t moved aggressively on this. He’s proposed to make permanent the tax breaks for families saving for college, but it’s generally too late for you as you’re in the ‘spending’ phase rather than the saving phase.
We may be arguing glass half empty/half full. I see the economy coming out of recession as a good thing. There is also a lot of tumult as a result of the recession. The crappy part of a recession is that it happens rapidly on the down side and is painfully slow on the upswing. There is no way around it. Much of capital wealth exists on paper and it can disappear overnight (as your 401K has already shown). I’ve been waiting for the hammer to drop on my company for years and have sweated the last 2 because of the economy.
You may indeed be right that the rich get richer during a recession. If I had invested money during the collapse of the stock market like I planned I would be sitting in my new house right now. That’s the lemming principal (people see other people selling off and respond in kind, driving everything down). The wealthy get to step in at the bottom and buy up the good stocks that were pulled down with everything else. Those are the breaks. Unfortunately, even though the stock market is easily accessible to the average wage earner few take advantage of it because of its complexity. IN an age of cell phones, internet, and cable, the trappings of wealth are often the reason people never achieve it.
Have to go, my cell phone is ringing.
You, sir, live in a bizarro dream world.
I graduated from college a year ago, under the Bush administration but well after the great dot com crash. I was unemployed for six months and lost the ability to pay for my house. I lived on couches and ate expired food that the supermarkets were going to throw out. After sending out literally thousands of resumes across the country, I wrote a pleading letter and sent it to every restaurant in town. I wasn’t qualified to be a waitress, so got a job as a hostess at Denny’s. Perhaps as a sign of this great economic recovery, I also picked up a job as a video store clerk and a hotel desk clerk. My annual income from these three jobs is about $8,000. Sometimes I can’t afford to eat dinner. I obviously have no benefits. A broken leg or bout of pneumonia will bankrupt me at 23 years old.
My friends, who graduated with me in 2003, work as waitresses (brain science major at Berkeley), door-to-door vacuum salesmen (engineering major ), warehouse employee that lifts boxes (computer engineering major), video store clerk (film major), hotel desk clerk (bioinfomatic major), standardized test graders (literature major and psychology major), candy store clerk (phsych major), bar back (history major) and temp worker (computer programming major- Ivy League). Only the warehouse employee has a full-time job. None have benefits of any sort. A number of my fellow graduates are still unemployed.
We are glad that our student loans are low interest.
Gas is over $50.00 a barrell.
I can’t imagine who is buying these new houses and investing in this stock. It certainly isn’t recent college graduates.
This economy is downright surreal. Me, I was an English major who took minors in French and history, and now I’ve got a decent job with a stock brokerage, in the marketing department. I used to teach English as a second language part time, too, but my schedule was just too full.
But I have to agree: this economy sucks. Yet the suburbs and exurbs around the country are full of huge mansions built by… someone. There does seem to be enough rich people to keep building these houses, considering the kind of people I have to deal with daily to do my job. But someone I know from Westchester County, New York (just north of New York City) told me about the peculiar occurance of young couples building large, expensive houses on huge lots which have more space in them that they need. Many of these houses have unfurnished rooms because these occupants don’t need them, and also don’t have the money to furnish them. My friend told me that she and her husband were looking to move to maybe a slightly larger house, but they couldn’t find one, oddly enough. Much larger house? Yes. But nothing mid-sized for a family of four.
Why is this? Contracters in the New York area are pretty upfront about it: they won’t build smaller or cheaper because it’s not worth their time. But all this overvalued real estate just seems like the precipice of doom, a syptom of a high concentration of wealth and a vanishing middle class. I know I’m lucky to have landed a job that pays well, even though it doesn’t mesh with my skill base, for the most part (I do plenty of writing on the job, but I don’t use my French.) But so many people are underemployed. Oh, yes, there’s value in all work, but jeez—the jobs just aren’t there like they were fifteen years ago. I’m convinced that all this deregulation of industry is setting us up for a crash—a crash that even stockbrokers and captains of industry won’t be able to weather. Over the past 24 years, American legislators have undone much of the twentieth century, with deregulation fever sweeping the nation. Social Security and the graduated income tax, it seems, will one day go the way of farm subsidies and (any day now) overtime pay.
What will Bush do for college students? Same thing he’s doing to the college graduates: make it easier to export jobs, and make it harder to make a living. By pulling out the controls, the stops, wealth gets more and more concentrated, and industry grows more and more indifferent to the American people. So why, Chance, are you worried about these people who aren’t doing as well as you are? Well, I’d say “Compassion,” but having grown up during the Reagan years, I learned that you’re not supposed to express compassion, at least not in economic terms. You’re supposed to look at things more selfishly, as in, “What will this do for—or to—me?” Well, a weak base hurts those at the top of the economy, and your share prices will collapse if your company doesn’t have anyone to sell to. A weak American economic base makes for a weak America, and we’re selling this country out on the philosophical point that those who run the companies deserve to keep all their money, as if those who work for those companies didn’t do anything, and as if those who provide America’s infrastructure aren’t doing anything at all.
This greed is trouble, and it’s what’s hurting all of us. I hate to look at it like this, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Once we’ve returned to a free-market wild west like we had in the 19th century, someone’s going to start fretting, and push for reform. Either that or the United States will descend into a neo-feudalism. It’s up to you.
Well, apparently the homebuyers around here are not Berkley graduates but then I don’t live in California. I’ll spare you the complete lecture of what I (and my friends) did in college but we all worked our way through. It took me over 12 years to get a degree. I drove junk cars, lived in a mobile home and survived without cable, or cell phones. I still don’t have cable, maybe someday.
Student loans? City colleges are free in California. Even if you wanted a Berkley degree you could have transferred your (free) 2 year degree over. If you wanted to get out in 4 years then the loan is your choice. I never considered a college loan so my 12+ years of college life offset’s your loan. Both were choices. Hard to say which is easier. I guess it depends on the interest rate.
$50 barrel?
Gas prices (adjusted for inflation) hit a high of $2.69/gallon while I was going to school and I drove a severely rusted Maverick, which got 18 mpg around town. If you adjust that to today’s 25 mpg cars then I was paying closer to $3.74/gallon.
Losing your house really sucks but the financial situation you grew up in is not unique. I did what I had to do to get through school. Working full time wasn’t fun but it was necessary for me. My reward for 24 years of work is a buyout by another company. I might get a raise, I might get a kick in the ass. Either way, I will deal with it.
I don’t know many recent graduates who are ready to buy their own homes, but investing in stock is a reality for many young graduates.
I know the economy sucks for many, and jobs are harder to find. But the reality it, recruiters are still coming to campus, and still hiring new college graduates. Fewer of them, perhaps, than in boom years, and fewer than there are new college graduates in the marketplace. You are in the sad position of being in that group of people who haven’t been recruited or landed a good job, and that sucks. But you (and the new college graduates you know) are simply in that unfortunate group. You don’t represent the totality of recent college graduates.
Your situation is difficult, and I regret that so many recent graduates have similar stories to tell. The economy has not been kind to many young people. But the reality is, your assertion that no recent college grads are succeeding in this economy (or not succeeding enough to invest money) just isn’t supportable.
I wonder how much of this jobless recovery is a result of easy credit terms that at some point in the coming years are going to hit the economy like a hammer. I picture more and more folk currently living off loans and credit cards until they can get that good job, being unable to find that good job that allows them to make their monthly payments and simply defaulting en masse at some point in the (near?) future.
This is not veiled political commentary, because I just don’t know. But I wonder.