Young people have problems. Jobs are disappearing, but more importantly good jobs are disappearing. The economy is filled with temp work, contract work, part time work, etc. Full time jobs with living wages, benefits and job security are becoming a smaller and smaller % of jobs out there.
We’re looking at massive debts due to pension crisis, health care crisis, etc.
Its going to be rough. People today are going to have a lower standard of living.
What pisses a lot of younger people off is that these are all manmade disasters. We could address shitty jobs, income inequality, shitty health care, climate change, etc. via legislation, Its just that the rich and powerful (and their bought and sold politicians) have no desire to do so.
We could pass universal health care. Rebuild labor unions. raise the minimum wage. Pass progressive taxes. Fund redistribution projects. Drastically increase public funding for renewable energy. Restrict the use of permatemps and contract work.
Here’s the thing, and I thought I pretty directly said this, but in review, maybe not.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
If you want to nationalize healthcare, make education mandatory through grade 17 (this one might actually have small possibilities) and give a basic income to everyone, well ok. Tons of issues there, but K suppose it could possibly be managed, maybe.
But you wouldn’t solve the real problem. You’d just be putting a different shade of lipstick on the pig you’re being forced to kiss.
Today’s youth aren’t the first to see mass migration of good jobs to other countries. That’s been happening since the 80s at least. Poverty, homlessness, all of it, there isn’t anything new in the plaint, we ALL went through that phase. Global Warming (sorry climate change) is on the verge of destroying human civilization? Ok, so what? There is always a climate ot nuclear war or terrorist or cosmic interdimensional portal or alien invasion that is about to wipe out mankind. We’re still here. That’s the beauty and strength of humanity as a whole, we’re smart enough and flexible enough to adapt and innovate and invent and dominate and control and manipulate our enviroment to the point that now, I’m not entirely certain that you could wipe away civilization with anything short of a planet killing asteroid. You know “Nothing would survive, not even bacteria”
Maybe its a harsh way of saying it, but the world IS a harsh place, its cold and unforgiving and can seem cruel, but only if you are so petty and small minded that you don’t see the larger picture. Grow up, put yer big pants on and get out there and make a mark on the world tiger. Don’t do what amounts to complaining that nobody finds you significant enough to pay attention to or bow before
You mean so that the people who earned the money get to keep more of it? That’s the American Dream: “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Then decide that you don’t deserve to keep the money from all those mousetraps you sold and demand that it be taken from you and be spent on what they want.”
There are two problems with the “tax the hell out of the rich” solution to everything. The first is philosophical–for the modern super-rich,the bulk of their money is virtual, tied up in the moment-by-moment vue of their companies’ stocks. I believe that people have a ethical and moral right to retain control over a company that they created as long as they want to and can hold on to enough shares of their company and not be forced to give up the company that they have built to success to pay extreme taxes. Don’t punish people for creating something that lots of people are willing to pay money for. The second problem is practical–the money rich people have is a limited resource. It is like fossil fuels–something that took a long time to accumulate but will be replenished far more slowly if ever at all. Everybody that wants to solve problems by taking all the rich people’s money are imagining spending the same money. You can’t spend all of the rich people’s money to fix the environment and spend all the rich people’s money to fix healthcare and spend all the rich people’s money to fix wage inequality and spend all the rich people’s money to fix the national infrastructure and spend all the rich people’s money on whatever other pet project you want to take their money away from them for.
You forgot to quote the part where Barr explains that the reason for all those problems is that we aren’t Jesusy enough. Barr isn’t a drama queen, Barr is a shitstain.
The problems faced by todays generation aren’t that severe compared to what humans in the past have gone through. People aren’t going to lose half their kids to disease, or starve to death, or consider it a good year when they have a hut to live in. None of us have it that bad.
But globalization affects the entire world. However it hasn’t resulted in massive growth in income inequality like it has in the US. The GINI coefficient in the US is much higher than europe, canada, australia, etc. Those nations have automation and outsourcing too. Inequality is largely due to political agendas designed to support inequality. In Canada, the wealth created is split among society. In the US it all goes to the top.
Also those nations have mandatory benefits (sick days, vacation days, health insurance) while in the US those are up to the whim of your employer.
The problem is that our problems are easily solvable, people just don’t want to solve them because rich people like these problems existing, and both parties work for the rich at the end of the day. That is what really gets under the skin of a lot of younger people. They see a world that is much safer, less stressful, less painful as being possible but corruption and greed are blocking it from happening.
This isn’t like the war on pathogenic bacteria, where the entire world came together to fight against various infectious microbes. These problems we are facing nowadays are solvable, but due to corruption the political will to solve them doesn’t exist.
Wesley, you’re still not changing anything fundamental. You’re still looking at things as though history started a few hundred years ago and Europe and the US have always been at the top, respectively. Jobs are shifting, power is shifting money is shifting all on a global scale. Big deal, nothing new there. The US is only special in how fast it rose to prominence.
You can give everyone universal health care, college, and basic income and you will still have the problems if nations conflicting, the enviroment and climate changing and people thiniking they are special and entitled to more than they have.
Your solvable problems will be solved, just not how you think or when you think they should be.
I’m not sure if I should sigh or yawn at this point.
ETA cause I forgot to put this in there, the problems will be solved by people, not governments. Some of those people will be in government, yes, some will be scientists, engineers, industialists, capitalists, and what have you.
Again, it seems like your view is a little too limited
The reason this time period seems different from past time periods is that in times past, leaders led. Governments acted. We fought the Nazis. We passed climate law. We closed the ozone hole. We addressed injustice with the civil rights act. We passed the social safety net so people would have a little help when they got old, disabled, infirm.
And now the generation that benefitted squarely from all that work and action are now saying “Oh well, stuff happens, can’t fix it. At least I got mine!”
Problems have always happened; we’ve just now decided they will magically solve themselves.
Just because I’m not impressed by your arguments doesn’t mean I don’t understand them.
Every generation has its struggles. This generations struggles are largely self inflicted by humanity the same way war is. Its a self inflicted struggle where younger generations are getting it worse than older ones.
And lots of people want resolution. Its just that due to corruption, resolution is not coming anytime soon. There is a growing sense of rage, despondency and helplessness over the fact that our problems can be solved, but will not be solved (or at least not solved anywhere near as quickly as they could be) due to corruption.
Every generation should ideally want their kids to have a better world than the one they had.
I’m almost 40. I can tell you that my parents and my wife’s parents had no idea I would be taking care of them financially (and some of them actually providing the roof they live under) at this age in my life.
They had no idea even though I am more educated than all four of them combined, I would be making less than they did when adjusted for inflation when they were working in the early 1980s.
They had no idea that they would have to watch my wife, their daughter or daughter-in-law, slowly lose permanent health battles you don’t come back from because we can’t afford insurance or to go to the doctor. They sure as hell quit bitching about their foreign doctor they get to see for free on Medicare after I had the “shut the F up already, at least you aren’t going to die in the next 5 years like your daughter is” talk with them.
They have had to learn the hard way what its like to rent a house these days. The last time either sets of our parents rented was in 1982. Two of them had to watch what it was like to get kicked out of your third house with a “sorry, you were great renters but we decided to sell. We appreciate your rent was always on time and the house looks better than it has in years.” They watched because they live with me and I pay that rent that just evaporates each month. They see that you now have to pay 4 or 6 months up front with your security deposit and first and last months rent.
I have taught them how to re-glue the soles on their shoes. I have showed them how to properly go two or three days without eating. (You taper food off, you don’t just eat big then skip meals, we will get paid next week, drink some water.)
I have showed them the value of dumpster diving. The computer I am typing this on came from the dumpster of an office building. Well, it was really three of them put together. I’ve eaten and fed my family out of the dumpster behind a small regional grocery store. They never thought it would get that bad.
Its funny I hear a lot of people telling the younger generation to “buck up, you will be fine” when the boomers that live with (and off) of me have the same panic for me and my wife. I seem to be talking them off of the ledge at least once a week. I finally broke down yesterday and screamed at my mother in law to quit telling me how bad we have it and how sorry she is that they wrecked our lives with their poor decisions. I told her its kind of hard to say that it sucks now so bad when its all I have ever known.
I think that its funny that the OP and the boomers that I pay for have the same fears. Those fears that they have I call “Tuesday”
I kind of get the impression that maybe there are some unrealistic expectations going on in the younger set w.r.t. jobs, pay and lifestyles. There are expectations that jobs be fulfilling, have lots of opportunity for quick promotions and pay raises, the work be meaningful, etc… And then they bitch when they can’t find these unicorn jobs- they either don’t pay enough, or if they do pay enough, they’re unfulfilling, very top-down, don’t have a lot of room for promotion, aren’t meaningful, etc…
I think previous generations were generally taught to suck it up and deal with it; you either figured it out and bent it to your own desires to the extent that you could, or you punched out and went elsewhere when you could manage it. But the overriding point was that you had a job, and that it paid well- job security was/is a serious thing among Gen-X and above. More so than other stuff like having a fulfilling job, or doing meaningful work, or whatever.
To a lot of us older folks, hearing twenty somethings gripe about how their jobs aren’t fulfilling, or don’t pay enough, or whatever is kind of perplexing. It’s not like we’ve had this grand parade of pay raises over the years; many of us have suffered wage stagnation in a serious way- over the past 20 years or so, you’d have to have made an average annual pay raise of about 3% to keep up with inflation. But how many people do you know who have consistently managed that sort of pay raise over the past ten years? Not a lot, I’ll wager. In my last job, they were stingy, and tended toward the 1-2% raises even for solid, if not spectacular performers. Which means that if you work there for any significant time period, you end up making LESS after inflation is calculated than when you started. And I know they’re not unique in offering low/no pay raises.
But we’re not out there griping on social media about the unfairness of it all, and how the government needs to come rescue us either.