Tuesday, August 07, 2012

The GOP and the Plight of the Under 40 Americans

A column in the Washington Post looks at the less than bright future of many in the under 40 generations.  A plight that would be only worsened by the policies favored by Mitt Romney which would shift massive amounts of wealth from the already struggling middle class to the extremely wealthy such as himself.  With three children of my own, I very much worry that my children will have less prosperity than I have had (at least until a homophobic judge took everything away from me) and far, far less than what my parents enjoyed.  Yes, there is still opportunity to succeed, but the deck is increasingly stacked against average Americans.  Hence why the much derided "Old Europe" now offers more chances for upward mobility than here in America.  Frighteningly, the cretins in the GOP base who are cynically manipulated by pandering to their religious and racially based bigotry just cannot grasp that they are supporting a party that nowadays cares nothing about their prosperity .  Here are some column highlights:

I worry about the future — not mine but that of my three children, all in their 20s. It is an axiom of American folklore that every generation should live better than its predecessors. But this is not a constitutional right or even an entitlement, and I am skeptical that today’s young will do so.

The young (and I draw the line at 40 and under) face two threats to their living standards. The first is the adverse effect of the Great Recession on jobs and wages. Even if this fades with time, there’s the second threat: the costs of an aging America. It’s not just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — huge transfers from the young to the old — but also deferred maintenance on roads, bridges, water systems and power grids. Newsweek calls the young “generation screwed”; I prefer the milder “generation squeezed.” 

Already, batteries of indicators depict the Great Recession’s damage. In a Pew survey last year, a quarter of 18-to-34-year-olds said they’d moved back with parents to save money. Getting a job has been time-consuming and often futile. In July, the unemployment rate among 18-to-29-year-olds was 12.7 percent. Counting people who dropped out of the labor market raises that to 16.7 percent  .   .   .   .   Among recent high-school graduates, unemployment rates are near half for African Americans, a third for Hispanics and a quarter for whites, notes the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

The weak labor market hurts even job holders. From 2007 to 2011, “real” (inflation-adjusted) wages fell nearly 5 percent for recent college graduates and 10 percent for recent high-school graduates  .  .  .  .

And then there are the costs of aging. Gains in productivity — from new technologies or better skills — that would normally flow into paychecks will be siphoned off to pay for retiree benefits, underfunded state and local government pensions and infrastructure repair. Taxes will rise; if not, public services will fall. Or both.  .  .  .  .  Chances are the young will still pay for today’s elderly without themselves receiving comparable support.

Peering into the unfathomable future, we [parents] don’t like what we think we see. We’re dispatching them into a less secure and less prosperous world. These parental anxieties, I think, are the presidential campaign’s great, unacknowledged issue. Many voters will decide based on a calculus of which candidate would minimize the economic perils for their grown children. 

There are real conflicts between the young and old; so far, the young are losing.

While neither Republicans nor Democrats seem willing to face the reality ahead, the GOP's obsession with prioritizing the shift of benefits to the wealthy and the elimination of even a semblance of health care security make the choice easy for me.  I'll hold my nose and vote Democrat because the alternative is far worse. 


No comments: