The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:
The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.
However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.
Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.
A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."
Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:
The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."
[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday May 27 2019, @10:20PM (2 children)
That's ridiculous. US foreign aid [wikipedia.org] is about 1% of government expenditures. What's more, if we were to use all of that money to "pay down" the national debt, it wouldn't cover even 15% of the annual *interest payments* on the debt [treasurydirect.gov].
Helping other places make things better can enable those places to improve their lot and (hopefully) more of their people will stay there and grow the global economy rather than trying to come to developed countries.
Next time, perhaps you should consider this [quoteinvestigator.com] before posting.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Monday May 27 2019, @11:55PM (1 child)
You've also got to look at what that "foreign aid" is, the top three are trying to clean up the mess the US made in Iraq and Afghanistan and propping up Israel, none of which can be discontinued. After that it's mostly chump change, still a few billion but that's not even a blip on a $20 trillion debt.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:00AM
Of course, we owe Israel so much. We should send more troops to protect them.