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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @03:25AM
> The top 5% or so are able to purchase pretty much anything they want, but there's a limit to how many HDTVs, frocks, cars, homes, personal massagers and other consumer goods the top 5% will buy.
I'll bite. Depending on how you measure, I'm in the USA 5% (but not the 1%). Yes, I can purchase the things you mention, but I mostly don't - one nice 46" TV from ~8 years ago, no frocks(!)/tuxedos--we buy our clothes mostly used, one car bought used 15 years ago (plus a couple of old cars willed to me by dying friends), one house. One luxury is buying high quality food (including organic). Another luxury is no debt.
This is because, at age 65 (still working), I'm hoping to save enough to have a retirement pot that is big enough to make sure I don't wind up in some awful "home". Don't have kids to take care of me--and from what I've seen of friends' kids, having kids these days is not much of a guarantee that the kids will stick around to do their traditional duty to their parents. I'm going to have to buy that old age security, finding trustees I can trust and so on.
If there was a strong safety net that really looked secure, I'm sure I'd be much more of a consumer and much less of a saver (as learned from my parents who went through the Great Depression).