they are the ones bitching and whinning and moaning about their lot
in life without actually offering any, ANY solutions of any kind…
in fact, three separate responses here were along the lines of “Fuck the boomers”…
and that is a solution, how exactly? as a boomer, I would say our greatest
crime against humanity has been disco and for that, I apologize… but the rest…
we too were given a hand that was not great and we did the best we could…
there are many guilty parties here and finding guilt isn’t that hard, but
a better response would be to search out and find solutions instead of bitching
about it…but no, you would rather tell boomers to “fuck themselves”…
and that is about as productive as I ever seen a millennial be…sooooooooo,
what’s it going to be, bitch and whine and complain some more OR find solutions…
Solutions? Your generation of baby boomers have bankrupted the west in total. It takes financial capital to change anything of which we no longer have. You would understand this if you had a firm understanding of economics moron.
In the west currently a devestating market correction is right around the corner going into the near future thanks to your generation. Hope you have plenty of canned cat food to eat chump.
P.S. I am tired of paying your worthless generation’s social security, Medicaid, and retirement pensions through income taxes.
Void, I think a national exchange program would partly address the risk you note in moving to another state. Having a community in another state should decrease that risk, by providing someone on the ground to provide information/scouting, and some social support on arrival. I think the perceived risk is larger than the actual risk (there is great risk in staying put in a bad job market), and a national exchange program would help with that as well, by showing students that they can relocate and adapt more readily than they believed.
This is my understanding as well, though I suspect its interaction with low mobility is not mainly by lock-in to rentals (though I concede that it probably does happen in some cases), but is related to the other economic issues you’ve identified: houses are more expensive than they used to be, as are apartments, and wages have been flat for a while, meaning that both buying a house and moving a long distance are harder to attain.
Maybe the economic barriers are creating a kind of learned helplessness, where kids grow up learning that they have very little ability to change their own outcomes, they are unable to become independent locally, and so they never even consider trying to become independent in another state.
I somewhat agree with Peter re Boomer’s blame for the current situation, except that a lot of the policies that really do shift value toward the middle aged and elderly are still in effect. It’s not useful to point fingers at each other, but rational policy reforms that remove burdens from young adults will mean shifting some of that burden to the middle-aged and elderly.
However, contrary to Void (and I think Otto, though I’m not sure if “bankrupt[ing] the [W]est” includes national debt), I don’t think the national debt is a bad thing. The US is still credit-worthy, we could borrow significantly more than we already have. That suggests that whatever we’ve borrowed, our returns are positive, and borrowing to invest in society was a good investment. Our current President’s campaign statements aside, we are not likely to default on our debts (or rather, we don’t need to, but who knows what we’ll actually do).
Oh, really? Look, the older generations had fifty plus years to plan politically for the future but instead has squandered and ruined for future generations to come. The older generations have no excuse as none of us younger people were alive to facilitate anything. Instead we get to live in a failed state that baby boomers have created.
Otto, Otto, Otto… you sound like one of those whiny, narcissistic, self-obsessed, privileged millennials. I thought you were more mature than that.
This is not the place to answer your boomer criticisms (some of which are valid - like disco - sorry about that) but I can’t help but post this video to show you how you come across to boomers like me who have worked our guts out trying to change things – remember, all the incredible social changes that happened between the authoritarian 1950’s to the 70’s were fought for - often brutally. Nothing was given to us. You guys don’t know that, or forget it.
PS: I love the youth today. I get along really well with them (just not the SJWs). I only wish they knew how fucking great they have it. That’s their problem; they take all that has been given to them for granted and only see what’s missing. (Sorry Carleas. I won’t hijack the thread any further)
K: I have been paying into the SS and Medicaid and retirement pensions for decades even
after a decade of anarchism…I have worked for over 40 years and I have had long stretches
of 50 plus hours of work at different jobs… I now only work at most 32 hours and that
is because my body can’t take working any more hours then 32 hours…
and I am certainly not alone… Millions upon millions of boomers have paid into the
SS and Medicaid and other such programs for decades… a few boomers I know
are retiring but most have to work on and many I know don’t have enough saved
up to retired and so many boomers will wind up working up to and perhaps for some,
more then 50 years… I think we have paid our dues…I know a lot of boomers who
have nothing saved up but the equity in their home… basically the only way we are going
to retire is to sell our homes because that is the only thing of value we have…
I too basically have only my condo as my retirement account…
and the only reason that has value is because of the extreme rise in home and condo
prices here in the bay area… the average home around here is worth a million two
and most condo’s are over 700,000 and climbing… a fall in the price of homes and condo’s
will destroy the retirement of millions… and that is a scary prospect…
we have paid into the system for decades and we expect to have something
for us after decades of putting into the system but again, most boomers I know
understand that they will probably won’t get their SS and are expecting nothing
from SS…so don’t go judging us from a young kids perspective because unless
you have walked in our shoes for decades, you have nothing to compare it to…
Otto, Peter, can’t we agree that identifying the right policy is highly unlikely to turn on the number of hours anyone in this conversation has worked?
I am serious.
Look, currently, the US can borrow money for 30 years at an effective interest rate of 1%. That is ludicrously cheap relative to expected market returns between 4% and 8%. If the government borrowed a bunch of money and invested that money in a sovereign wealth fund, odds are that we would be better off. Let me put that another way, because I’ve been accused of advocating gambling for similar statements in the past: given what we know about the cost of borrowing money, and the likely return on investments, the most reasonable prediction is that we will be better off in the case where we borrow and invest than in the case where we don’t borrow and don’t invest.
Debt is bad when you have nothing to show for it. It seems like we have a lot to show for the debt we’ve taken on as a country. And so long as we borrow for a good investment, the debt isn’t bad.
Every nation or common must guarantee a sustainable development (the German word “Nachhaltigkeit” should better be used here), which includes just fairness, goodness, rightness, justice, especially generational justice; otherwise it will experience the “tragedy of the commons”.
I thought we were talking about debt. Let me rephrase it in your words, if that will help: “If you want to have sustainable development,” borrowing at 1% and investing at 4% is “fair, good, right, just, and especially generational[ly] just.”
Well, guess what? After your generation has outsourced all the good paying jobs or have them automated the pool of younger people in the working force to pay for your entitlements are not there in any meaningful way. Looking to the future I see a social security and retirement pension crisis along with a currency crisis also. All of you baby boomers better have a plan B…
More likely than not all your years of hard work and paying in the system will be all for nothing. Don’t get too comfortable skippy.
it is quite true that depending on how the debt is spent on,
it can be a good thing or a bad thing…
think about it in terms of personal finance… we go into debt
quite willingly if we think the debt will achieve some goal…
buying a new car puts us into debt but the payoff of
having a reliable car that will insure us getting to our
destination is a payoff… most people will take that…
taking on debt for a long term goal…
a good deal of the debt in this country is in pensions
and we have a deal in regards to that…
a pension is a contract… we agree to work for you in return
for a pension…to negate a pension is to negate that contract…
that is why pension and social security are contracts that can not
be touch because to touch them is to violate or break the contract
made…now those who are whining about Obama debt should
actually know something about history… Bill Clinton left bush Jr.
a very small debt… I recall in fact, how the GOP was very unhappy with
such a small debt and claimed that it was BAD for America to have such
a small debt… (research 1998 and 1999 to see this) the massive expansion
of debt occurred under bush Jr. (a minor side note is that the debt
falls under democratic adminstrations and rises during the GOP administrations,
historical fact, easy to looked up) but the real point is that debt can be
a good thing or a bad thing depending on its uses… going into debt as
a country can be good if we use the debt to work on infrastructure rebuilding
because that actually becomes beneficial… the return on one dollar spent
on infrastructure spending is $2.34 return for every dollar spent…
and the return on a dollar going to a tax cut is .84 cents…(several studies
done over the year has concluded this) so going into debt to rebuild actually
does have a return on the dollar that is much better then just a tax cut…
so as usual, most stories have more then one aspect to them…
just as there are rarely ever one solution to any given problem…
solutions and problems have a multitude of possibilities within them…
that is the problem with solutions and problems… there is rarely ever
one problem with one answer… now do I see the initial problem stated by
Carleas as young people unable to move as often as their parents or grandparents
being a problem, no, but within that lies other problems as stated,
the young don’t have the resources to move out and other similar
problems… but I think this tied into a bigger problem as most problems
do tie into larger problems… we have yet to face the question of
the value of a human being… a human being has certain inalienable rights
and among those rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…
and we have increased those rights to include an education, to love, medical,
treatment, the right to shelter and eating and safety among our certain
inalienable rights… rights that are guaranteed by our existence as living
human beings…rights that exist for every single living human being…
that is the real problem… we have yet to include human beings, little less
ALL living things into our equation of what is valuable…
Carleas question is but a small portion of the larger question…
as I grow older, I see everything more as a question and not an answer…
life is an question and what is the solution?
everything is really connected and asking for specific answers to
specific questions is to disconnect aspects of answers and questions
that need to be asked and answered together, not separately…
The only way for the United States to restructure its debt nationally is through bankruptcy, of course this would cause the collapse of the American government and economy however there is no other recourse as all of that is inevitable.
Debt is just the opposite of generational justice (a.k.a.: intergenerational justice). We should also have in the case of money what we should have in the case of all products and goods coming from nature: Nachhaltigkeit (“sustainable development”).
Debt has definetely to do with the future. Nobody can deny that.
So if you burden the generations of the future with debts and/or a dirty natural (and probably also social) environment, then you are not fair, not just, not good, not right.
As you most likely know, there’s good debt and bad debt. Good debt is when you borrow to invest in something that will bring in a return; bad debt is when you borrow to pay for something that won’t bring in a return. This is why debt is often separated into private and government debt. The former is often good; the latter is often bad as the government usually needs money just to keep things afloat rather than to invest.
If it wasn’t for the wars, the U.S. would have crashed ages ago. The perpetual wars are what’s keeping the U.S. going.
They’re not just keeping a huge military-industrial complex humming along or gaining access to more oil, but more importantly, the wars are taking out dictators who challenged the U.S. petrodollar.
There are several reasons for the never ending wars (which is why lots of interest groups support them) but the one that’s related to the economy/finance/debt is the U.S. petrodollar.
The recent turmoil started in the 70’s when Saudi Arabia threatened to use oil as a weapon against the U.S. for its support of the Zionist regime in Israel. The U.S. threatened to bomb Saudi Arabia back to being a desert if they didn’t start selling oil again and only trading it for U.S. dollars. They accepted.
More recently, Saddam was attacked after he said he’d only accept Euros for his oil. Gaddafi was attacked after he dropped the U.S. petrodollar AND the Euro (notice the British and French largely led that war). Gaddafi went further by beginning to set up a new currency for a United Africa that was outside of the control of the International banking system.
My point being that if you stopped the wars, stopped overthrowing countries that wanted to take control of their own financial futures, stopped rigging the system and stopped inflating the value of the U.S. dollar through extreme violence, the U.S. would crash under the weight of their debt.
People like you, Carleas, speak about the economy as though everyone’s playing the game according to rules. Nothing can be further from the truth. The entire system is rigged from top to bottom.
(Sorry if I don’t respond further. I have a ton of work to do. Boomers are still booming )
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That would only work if we had governments revolving around sustainable development of all kinds instead we have governments owned by banks and corporations. Until that changes nothing will and probably won’t until what has become of our unsustainable societies fully collapse internally.
I work fifty five hours a week dude.
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