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Millennials Set To Earn Less Than Generation X (bbc.com)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: Millennials are set to become the first generation to earn less than their predecessors, new research suggests. The Resolution Foundation found that under-35s earned 8,000 pound ($10,600) less in their twenties than Generation X workers. If wages for millennials follow the same path as Generation X, average career earnings will be about 825,000 pound ($1.1m). That would make them the first generation to earn less than their predecessors over the course of their working lives. Research found that some of the pay squeeze was due to under-35s entering the job market as the recession hit, but it also concluded that generational pay progress had ground to a halt even before the financial crisis struck in 2007/8.
Housing is up, education is up, not so sure on transportation. I suspect that is regionally up in some places down in others.
The smog has been cut way back, ozone is coming back, acid rain is gone. Those were worthwhile trades for higher transportation costs I think.
The Resolution Foundation found that under-35s earned 8,000 pound ($10,600) less in their twenties than Generation X workers. If wages for millennials follow the same path as Generation X...
It sucks to reach adulthood during a deep recession. Not sure it makes sense to use that as a predictor of the future though.
Hopefully future administrations will realize that an economic boom is always followed by a bust. You aren't helping the country with bubbles like the stock market and housing ones that were set off in the 1990s.
It's time to stop blaming this directly on politics and realize the nature of the economy is evolving, and that past economic patterns are probably dying.
Earning and employment problems are plaguing almost ALL "mature" (industrialized) nations, not just the socialistic or capitalistic nations. Switching to be more socialistic or more capitalistic is not solving it, at least not in terms of wages and job growth.
I believe a combination of automation, and easy access to cheap educated 3rd-world labor via the internet is the main culprit.
We may have to experiment to find solutions rather than keep fighting over doctrine. These experiments include but are not limited to:
1. Tariffs on "lopsided trade" countries to encourage them to normalize their currency and/or allow more local consumption. Dictatorial countries favor employing their population (so they don't riot) and disfavor consumption and/or outside products. We gotta push them harder, or they won't budge. Tariffs are not to start trade wars, but encourage balanced trade. Crank the tariffs up slowly, if they don't comply, to avoid market shocks.
2. Tax the rich to either provide subsistence for those without good jobs, and/or to stimulate the economy by putting more cash in consumer pockets.
3. "Helicopter Money", which is essentially printing more money and giving it to regular folks and/or spending it on infrastructure. Inflation has been lower than expected, suggesting there is enough spare capacity in the global economy to absorb more cash in an orderly fashion. (QE, a cousin of HM, mostly trickled into the rich, not down.)
4. "Make work" programs, such as cleaning up trash, landscaping, day-care, etc. Make-work programs, in part because of inefficient/outmoded office practices, have kept Japan's employment rate high, although arguably have stagnated economic growth: people in Japan can buy less, but at least have jobs. There may be a trade-off between jobs and stuff.
Most conservatives say that "less regulation" is the key. That's doubtful.
States that have tried it, such as Texas and Kansas have had very questionable results. While their unemployment rate has remained relatively strong; wages, infrastructure, medical, pollution, and education have suffered. They get slightly more employment but gut their state in exchange.
They are essentially competing with the 3rd world by becoming more like the 3rd world. I hope that's not our only option.
The problem is that calling something an "experiment" is political suicide. Voters want "decisive" leaders, not tinkerers; it's one reason why Trump has risen: "Mr. Do-it". But sometimes the right solution involves first admitting you have no ready answer.
Table-ized A.I.
Or its because rather than working hard to EARN more than the last generation they are busy complaining about it. I am a millennial and and currently making more than my very successful parents were making when they were my age. But I worked my ass off to be where I am and have never complained about that work. My "friends" went to college but then screwed around at work and had no drive to do better. They don't work long hours to get ahead and they are stuck in the same spot 5 years later. Then they complain and think that if only we taxed the "rich" more and redistributed it then everything would be better. Some are public servants and think they are worth "more". I have to remind them that they make well over the poverty line and that they are the taxpayers - (it won't be redistributed to them).
I started with long shitty hours (but nothing compared to my parents). I have the same / similar degrees as both my parents (MBA), from the same state university. Yet somehow I have managed to do better than them and work less hours, as a millennial. I know this doesn't fit the narrative. Probably because people like me don't bother to get up and talk to the media to complain about how well we are doing.
Even making this post is an insane waste of my time other than I feel the narrative needs to be corrected. We are doing just fine. We just want the same exact things our parents had. The things they spent 30+ years earning. And we want them the day we walk out their door.
A few possible rabbits (mostly bad):
1) WWIII (which would have to stay conventional and our side would have to win - though casualties would be in the hundreds of millions around the world).
2) US government bankruptcy (this destroys the fiat dollar and a generation's savings, but the gov't can no longer can run up debt that squeezes discretionary spending.)
3) A second "black plague" that culls the herd around the globe and humble everyone enough so they'd be more willing to help each other out and cut people's dependence on less efficient, government-sponsored socialism.)
4) Some new technology that creates such wealth and comfort that average people no longer have to work and capitalism is transformed into something completely different.
My money's on #3.
People from the US refer to social democracy as socialism regardless of whether it is based on capitalist of communist platform. From my prospective (I am the writer of that posted you responded to), Sweden where some of my childhood friends from Estonia moved is one of the most socialist countries that ever existed. They redistribute wealth (means of production) to the portions of their society that need it - not the portion that puts in majority of the effort or has the most control. Government controls how the 50%+ of the wealth is distributed via the federal budget. That makes them socialist de facto.
No offense, friend, but that is the stupidest goddamn thing I've seen on the Internet in the past half-hour. Lazy thinking like that is how the government gets away with reporting low inflation numbers. The really big ticket items, housing, education, cars, health care have gone up by a factor of ten since the 1980s.
At the same time, the actual starting wages in a Ford plant today is less than it was in 1980.
But at least you'll be able to play Pokemon Go when you're in the bread lines.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Be warned, this is LONG, but it's not a rant, it's a summation. I've tried to edit it down, but I'm my own worst editor, I tend to write (and speak) long. So please bear with me.
OK, here's the deal: Some of you will think this belongs on infowars, or breitbart, or whatever the paranoid-consipiracist right-wingnut site du jour is. Others will think this belongs in motherjones, or huffpost, or whatever the paranoid-conspiracist left wingnut site du jour is. And I'm sure there's people who wrote "WHY IS THIS HERE?!@?!!", I just can't see them since I have no mod points today I'm reading at threshold=1.
Sad truth is both sides are playing us. This story is so whack it could pass for a legit Onion story!
The short of it: This guy Powell -- a Democrat, who served on the boards of 11 big companies wrote a memo in 1971 basically saying Academia was mounting an attack on Free Enterprise. This memo was sent to his buddy, the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor. Then Powell gets put in the Supreme Court by Nixon.
The result of the memo - which was kept secret from The People for a while - was the rise of Neo-Liberalism, that is, de-regulation, free-trade, and turning our economy from a production economy to a "services" economy - which really means "Financial" economy. Yeah. Banks rule us, and they crashed mightily in 2007-2008, and are still trying to put the pieces back together.
So this Powell memo becomes one of the factors that created the corporate culture we have today. Republicans and Conservatives get the blame, when the idea and first motions were from a Liberal Democrat.
Essentially, the result was the manipulation of media and Academia - through grants, through favors, through good old-fashioned cocksuckery - to shift the thinking of the People to thinking that Free Enterprise was a good thing, that Government shouldn't meddle with business (de-regulation). A number of think-tanks were established, that were pro-business and anti-socialist.
At the same time while all those pieces were put together, Nixon un-hitched the dollar from the gold standard, the 1973 and 1979 energy crisis happened, the economy tanked, and the rest of the 20th century was spent in a downard slope.
This neo-liberal foundation helped shape the Reagan economic policies, the whole trickle-down thing, the reduction of corporate taxes, etc.
By the 90's it looked like the slope had stopped, but in the early 00's it fell off a cliff and it's still doing so.
So yes, people - we got robbed by liberals, democrats, conservatives and republicans combined. But somehow the blame has been shifted to the conservatives, as if it is their fault for breaking the US.
Sources? Citations? Do your own reading. Start with the Powell Memo itself, then some Chomsky, and your own examination of the event past half century. Find out what think-tanks were created and what the spout. Find out what rules were taken out to let business "flourish." This is all out there, in the open, from sites and books that are both conservative and liberal. This is not a one-sided thing, folks.
It'll turn your stomach, it will, doing that kind of reading.
We got played, by both sides, but the foundation was a liberal foundation, upon which most of the economic policies of today were built on.
I don't believe any of these people. Not a one. Especially not Billary, and especially not Trump.
What do we do? Suffer quietly, England-style? Revolution? We're trapped, folks. And what happened here spread to other countries, so emigration to say, England, is not an option, things over there and in Europe are also whacked.
I think we're going to have to let this take its course. Let it burn, stand back and just let it burn. People already are hurting. People already have lost jobs and are having no luck in getting something like what they lost. And we're going to have to let it burn, and once it's all ashes, we'll build it again. But
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
SS was never meant to be a savings plan, more like a pyramid scheme where you collected something from everyone working and divvied it up among those that weren't. Which worked well as long as each generation did better than the last. The problem was that the baby boomers were a bubble in the pipeline and the prediction was that those of us working when they retired would get screwed. The Regan fix would have actually fixed it, if congress could have actually balanced the budget between ~85-15 rather than just deficit spending more than the trust fund took in. So taken at a face value the fact that the government continues to spend more than it takes in has little to do with SS, which is a separate tax with a separate funding model.
Again by itself, SS is fine, the trust fund is ok too from the perspective of it having a lot of spare cash, and with just minor tweaks (removal of the SS wage cap for starters) fixes it for another generation or two. Not paying people with a net worth > $1 million is another tweak, things that are all fairly pedestrian but for some reason can't get any traction in congress. I leave you to reason about that....
My high school had no auto shop, and does any school have an HVAC class...I seriously asking was that really ever a thing?
Yes. I graduated in 1999 and even then my high school had vocational classes available to train to be an auto-mechanic, carpenter, electrician, or HVAC tech. And those jobs pay pretty well. My brother actually went the more vocational route (I went to college, though I did major in a STEM field) and he's making within 5% of my salary with only a high school diploma.
Sadly though those programs have been discontinued. It's no longer considered "respectable" to work with your hands - even if it's a well paying occupation that takes a lot of skill to do.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Wrong on so many levels.
Perhaps you should read and study the economic history of the US since the 1970s to gain a better perspective on the realities, as opposed to using your half baked assertions.
It has been shown over and over again that since the collapse of unions, the off shoring of manufacturing, globalization, increasing automation, etc that those who used to be in the American Middle Class have had a harder and harder time staying there since the 1970s.
This has nothing to do with organic artisan tacos or PBRs or any other "look at me being the snarky/witty guy!" bullshit you care to throw out there.
As I said, please try to read and understand what has happened in the last 30 years to the American Middle Class.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It's not that I hate people being brought out of extreme poverty.. it's just that I don't understand why it has to be all on my back instead of the back of whatever government they live under.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You're stupid. US citizens spent about 10.7 trillion in retail expenses in 2011 (first number I could easily find), to get that to our current budgetary levels you're going to need to tax that at around 30% (+ income from other taxes) to cover federal spending for that time period, and I don't know about you but I sure as hell am not currently paying 30% in federal taxes. And keep in mind, that's 30% ACROSS THE BOARD, no exemptions for low income or food stuffs, etc. "Oh well we can cut government spending to make up the difference!" OK, you're going to need to cut government expenditures probably in half to make a fair tax work without inordinately hurting the lower classes, good luck with that. Now if you wanted to abolish income tax and supplant it with a low rate fair tax, I may be game there, but make sure you're only talking about personal income tax, continue to tax the corporations otherwise we're never going to be able to meet budgetary requirements.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
How is corporate welfare not socialism?
Socialism doesn't mean "for the little guy." It means "the means of production owned or controlled by the state."
Corporate welfare qualifies.
Actually socialism means "the means of production owned or controlled by the people". This can be the State, it can be through co-ops, credit unions etc. Ideally is getting rid of government though it is hard as the Stalinists usually show up and fuck things.
Ideally socialism needs to be combined with libertarianism.
http://webcache.googleusercont...
http://www.spookmagazine.com/w...
http://archive.is/SvI7U
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism