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70% of Millennials Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck: Survey:
Millennials' wallets are rather skimpy.
Seventy percent of the generation said they're living paycheck to paycheck, according to a survey by PYMNTS and LendingClub, which analyzed economic data and census-balanced surveys of over 28,000 Americans. It found that about 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, but millennials had the biggest broke energy.
By contrast, 40% of baby boomers and seniors said they live paycheck to paycheck, the least of any generation. Living paycheck to paycheck reflects economic needs and wants just as much, if not more than, incomes or wealth levels, according to the report. Age and family status also factor in greatly. This explains why millennials, who turn ages 25 to 40 this year, are struggling.
[...] It doesn't help that millennials have faced one economic challenge after another since the oldest of them graduated into the dismal job market of the 2008 financial crisis. A dozen years later, many are still grappling with the lingering effects of The Great Recession, struggling to build wealth while trying to afford soaring costs for things like housing and healthcare and shouldering the lion's share of America's student-loan debt.
The pandemic threw yet another wrench into their plans by giving them their second recession and second housing crisis before the age of 40. The report acknowledges that the pandemic played a major role in that stretched thin feeling.
[...] It seems, then, that it's a combination of external economic circumstances, a precarious life stage, and some spending habits that are leaving millennials feeling strapped for cash.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 29 2021, @02:05PM (6 children)
This situation isn't accidental, at all.
The first thing you have to remember is that the seams of the US economy came apart in the 1970's. Some of that was stagflation, some of that was the oil crisis, and some of that was political dysfunction that had been inherited from the late 1960's and Nixon in particular. Then along comes Ronald Reagan and the people he's fronting for, and says "I've got a plan for fixing this: We'll bust the unions, give big tax breaks to the rich, intentionally cause massive unemployment, and basically intentionally screw over everybody who isn't rich so that they never get an inflation-adjusted raise ever again." Wall Street skyrocketed, and that enabled Reagan to get away with it, and was even hailed as a hero by many, and the rich really liked not having to pay taxes anymore, so they poured money into movement conservatism to keep the racket going. The Democrats, who had for decades relied on the now-busted unions for their primary financial backing, got desperate for cash, and Bill Clinton came along and happily took rich-people money, and said "I've got a plan for fixing this: We'll keep all the stuff Reagan did in place, and add in getting rid of tariffs so companies no longer have to manufacture anything in the US anymore and deal with those pesky labor laws. But don't worry, we'll make it easier to borrow against your house if you own one, or your future if you're a teenager trying to go to college." And that helped Wall Street even more and fixed up the federal budget, so got away with that, so now Democrats and Republicans alike know that they can get away with screwing over the middle and especially the working classes without any political penalties whatsoever. And it's been that way ever since in the US, with both major parties making sure that the rich get richer and those who aren't rich have to pay the bill, and people who try to oppose those policies treated as fringe figures.
Meanwhile, the middle and working classes have made all the adjustments they can possibly make to try to function. Families that had previously made good union wages had to switch to non-union lower-wage work. Families that had previously had a non-working homemaker now sent her to work. Families that had previously been homeowners borrowed money against their home to try to make ends meet, until they lost those homes in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Since blue-collar prosperity was no longer a viable option, and we'd conveniently gutted high-school vocational programs, young people were faced with the option of either working at fast food and retail the rest of their adult lives, or borrowing against their future earnings to go to college, only to find that those future earnings didn't exist anymore. And contrary to popular belief, personal consumption has been dropping like a rock over this period.
But desperation is very profitable for people who have capital. Why, don't worry about that unexpected bill, you can take out a payday loan and pay 450% interest! Don't worry about losing your home, you can rent out a similar home and only pay 75% more than you used to spend on your mortgage! Don't worry about your student loans that wouldn't even exist in most countries, you can defer them for now and increase your interest costs so that you can still be paying these loans when you're in your 60's! Don't worry about your boss stealing your wages, that's just a minor civil matter if it's pursued at all by anybody! Don't worry about that massive medical bill because the insurance that was supposed to cover you decided it had an excuse not to, we'll just garnish your wages forever to pay for it!
Americans are screwed so long as what used to be called public corruption continues to be business as usual.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 29 2021, @03:22PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01 2021, @05:33PM (1 child)
The market will fix everything!
lol your brain is special
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 01 2021, @05:42PM
Well, let us note that a market fix over this time period was the creation of a variety of high tech industries which in turn drove demand for US labor. IMHO, that's the huge reason US wages (and developed world labor in general) didn't collapse. Maybe you ought to pay attention to history next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @02:57AM (2 children)
Another crucial element to the lapse of the working class is the rapud rise in female employment over the years without the proportinal decrease elsewhere. Where all these jobs came from, I do not know, bit it doea occur to me that this was one of the many components of tge decorrelation of productivity and wages, I do also suspect it has quite a bit to do with the impoverishment of blacks, as this occurred nearly simultaneoualy alongside the civil righta movement, meaning that blacks entered into a market where they were already behind, and where the market forced them to stay in place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @11:34AM (1 child)
"The market" didn't force black people to stay in place, racism did. They were less often to be hired when non-black people were available and less often promoted when non-black people were available. Since labor supply exceeded demand, the market would never fix racism. The only way the market would fix it is if labor demand greatly exceeded supply. We had women entering the work force and improvements in automation, so that never happened.
There is no capitalism fix for this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @03:45PM
Capitalism doesn't see it as a problem. Capitalism doesn't see problems in most things.