Recession taking toll on "lost generation"

[dkf]

WASHINGTON - Call it the recession's lost generation.

In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others — nearly 1 in 5.

New 2010 census data released Thursday show the wrenching impact of a recession that officially ended in mid-2009. It highlights the missed opportunities and dim prospects for a generation of mostly 20-somethings and 30-somethings coming of age in a prolonged slump with high unemployment.

"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.

"Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade," Sum said.

http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?&feed_id=0&catid=20110000&videofeed=36&nb_splitPage=1

[Harmony Blue]

1. Fortunately they can ride out the storm

I feel really bad for those near retirement, or those who have recently retired that must seek employment once more. With the way Capitalism is designed, if you are too old you are not considered useful anymore to the Capitalists.

[SammyWinstonJack]

2. +1. nt

[WildEyedLiberal]

6. Really? With tens of thousands in toxic student loans and a minimum wage job?

I guess poverty among the youth is okay, though, because we're just "riding out the storm." We can't buy a house or enjoy any kind of meaningful standard of living, but we can "ride out the storm" in our shitty little fleabag apartments working jobs that require a GED when we have a graduate degree and wonder if we'll EVER enjoy even the simple middle class life our parents had.

Oh, sorry. I forgot that everything is about the boomers. My bad. :eyes:

[TwilightGardener]

9. What is a "toxic" student loan?

And why would new college grads be buying a house?

[WildEyedLiberal]

10. You truly don't think that entering the work force with 10, 50, 100k worth of loans isn't toxic?

Really? And guess what - my parents bought a house when they were 25. And they had high school diplomas. Yet it's a-okay for college graduates and people with master's degrees to not even be able to afford a small house? Seriously? You DON'T see something wrong with that picture?

[TwilightGardener]

11. I had around $15,000 in student loans, my husband had around

$20,000. Mine were paid off a few years ago, my husband is 41 and still paying on his last year of payments--20 years, off and on (a couple hardship deferments). We didn't buy a house until I was 30. I guess I never saw my situation as all that unusual or difficult.

[Matariki]

20. You are so very correct.

If we were a civilized country, higher education would be affordable for everyone. By affordable I mean mostly paid for. If we were a smart country we'd realize that affordable education is an important investment in our nation's future, literally and not in some feel-good abstract way.

[TheWraith]

28. My ex-girlfriend was looking at $135,000 in loans by the time she left college.

Her degree? Masters in Education from a not so great college.

[WCGreen]

34. Why in heavens name did you borrow so much money....

My Niece is in hock for over 250k and she will never be able to do anything as far as buying a house for at least 20 years.

[WildEyedLiberal]

35. Because law school is expensive

:eyes:

[jtown1123]

14. A toxic student loan is a private loan with varying interest rates that double and triple

if you miss a payment, which many of them set you up to do by not processing timely payments and other insidious shit.

[ellisonz]

25. You have to be able to save for a downpayment to ever be able to purchase property.

THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH:eyes:

[Harmony Blue]

15. I am part of the lost generation too

but luckily I have a good paying job. At least we have time on our side, or I would like to hope. I feel bad for those that don't have even that to cling to.

[Initech]

30. I am too.

But I make $12 an hour - it will be damn near impossible for me to pay off a lot of my loans, and I'm starting back to college in the winter, I'm hoping this stupid crap we're in economically will be done by the time I'm out.

[WildEyedLiberal]

32. That's the gamble I made

I had no debt from my bachelor's degree, and I am VERY fortunate in that regard. But I graduated with a history degree right when the economy was starting to tank, so I ended up with a shitty part-time job that literally a high school kid could've done. Now I'm in law school, racking up grotesque amounts of debt in the hopes that at least I'll have a legitimate professional job at the end of it - but will I be any financially better off, since I'll be at least $150k in the hole? I doubt it. But I HAD to get either a) a full time job or b) go back to school so I could maintain health insurance, because I have a serious pre-existing condition and staying on health insurance is very possibly a life or death thing for me. So I am gambling my future in the hopes that there will be enough of a market for legal jobs in 2 years that I'll land one and that I'll somehow be able to handle my insane loans and stay on health insurance.

Yeah, riding out the storm my ass. Ain't we younguns got it so grand? :eyes:

[Initech]

33. Seriously.

I'm getting sick of the Wall St. criminals telling us that we're the ones that need to sacrifice. It's fucking disgusting. I'm so tired of working minimum wage jobs, I don't want to go to a diploma mill like University Of Phoenix or a career technical bullshit college to get ahead, I really want to go to an actual four year university - I'm worried about the loans I have to pay back later.

[LooseWilly]

39. I graduated in the wake of the other Bush's recession, my degree has been economically worthless...

Sure, I switched from computer science to English just before the dot-com boom... and gambled my time by teaching English abroad and writing novels while working crappy-ish jobs rather than finding an (unpaid) internship when I was "supposed to" (what the fuck is the deal with that expectation??).

On the plus-side, I got the chance to write a novel about strategies to pick up women while homeless and shoplifting for food... on the downside I'm over 40 and working retail with a degree, and I haven't had health insurance for over a decade.

Good luck with the law degree... just wanted to let you know that the boomers have job-blocked plenty of gen X'ers just as surely as they are now job-blocking the "lost generation". If anything, they're just getting better and better at it. Luckily for you, Health Care has been "reformed"... ;)

[Matariki]

19. Loans that will NEVER go away, it should be noted

[JVS]

7. No they can't. And if their problems are ignored they will toss the old over the boat.

[Pithlet]

18. If the problems the younger generation are facing are brushed aside or considered inconsequential

We're all screwed. I think it's a shame that our expectations for standards of living in our country have dwindled so low that we don't even seem to care anymore. The growing divide between the haves and have nots affects all of us. Pitting our problems against each other solves nothing.

[LooseWilly]

37. It's not just "they" who're gonna be riding out the storm, it's "us"... including you

I don't feel bad for those near retirement who stay on in their jobs... just the opposite— I think that if they'd just fecking retire already then maybe they'd open some opportunities for the Gen X'ers who've been forced to live off the scraps the boomers have let slip through their fingers over the last couple of decades... And that might open some opportunities for some of those "scraps" for the "lost generation" to move in on.

Instead, the boomers seem to have become so accustomed to their "plenty" that, in the face of economic meltdowns that their peers have steered the country into with their never-ending cycles of cutting their own taxes (Prop 13 in CA, I'm looking at you) while maintaining their profits by outsourcing rather than acknowledging slimmer profit margins by continuing to pay their neighbors to do the work in question... in the face of all the havoc the boomers have wrought, they are now holding on to positions that pay reasonably well and in the process leaving the young and even the "middle aged" with no prospects of sharing in the "wealth" that they had access to in their time.

All the boomers who "feel bad" for the youth should just go ahead and take the buy out packages offered by their corporate masters, and then supplement those retirement funds by taking a shitty retail job out here with the "lost generation" and the "gen X"ers... make room for some social mobility already— it makes the rest of us "feel bad" (a little) to have to just hope that you'll die already so that we can have an opportunity to take your job.

You see, that's the real design of capitalism... it's not just that you might have to worry that the capitalists think you're no longer useful... it's that you are gluttoning yourself on resources that capitalism is keeping your younger peers hungry for, and forcing us to cross our fingers that, if you won't retire, you'll die. (That's one of the biggest reasons that the young in France were so militant in general strikes protesting the attempts by Sarkozy to raise the French retirement age... if the old keep working then the young are left to twiddle their thumbs or smoke crack— but working for reasonable wages is ruled out as an option.)

[ellisonz]

38. +1000

[raccoon]

40. You don't like boomers, do you? You seem to think they are all well off and could retire whenever

they wanted to.

I wish I could.

Welcome to Ignore.

[LooseWilly]

41. I think anyone who talks about how the young can "ride it out"...

has young who don't have to support themselves... and if they can support them as they "ride it out"... then yes, I frankly do think they could retire at anytime (especially if they take a crappy retail job like the young are faced with to supplement retirement/401K/IRA/what-have-you).

If you're a boomer and you can't retire... I think that odds are pretty good that it's because you were "short changed" by policies enacted by (other) boomers. If you (or someone else since you now ostensibly have me on ignore) would like to explain how the erosion of retirement options is the result of someone other than boomers, I'd be happy to consider the explanation.

In the meantime, I will take the defensive tone of your post to indicate that you would simply rather not consider the possibility that your fellow boomers screwed you and many others like you over in order to line their own pockets. (Take from the poorer, laborers, and give to the richer, bosses/management, has been corporate management strategy for maximizing profits for at least 30 years now... which is about the range of time when the boomers reached an age to be the ones in control of the levers of power in society at large...)

[Modern_Matthew]

3. I'm part of the "lost generation."

And Wal-Mart is devouring my potential.

[reggie the dog]

4. me too, i am 32 and get by on temporary teaching contracts

and some other stuff like grape harvesting, a bit of masonry and such, great use of my Master's degree

[KurtNYC]

5. 4 years in and they still insist this is a "recession" ?

People have lost houses, careers, healthcare, and hope. That's a depression.

[area51]

8. +1

The media's been allergic to the truth for a long time, we've been in a Depression for a long time now.

[jannyk]

12. Not only that, but it's two years 'over'. Yeah, right.

[Yavin4]

13. Soon, America's Youth Will Venture Abroad to Begin Their Careers and Lives

And that will be the final nail in the coffin.

[AverageJoe90]

16. I seriously doubt that many people will actually LEAVE the country.........

I can see that happening in China in about a decade or two, though, their economy is in an actual, and MASSIVE, bubble and is liable to implode by then.

[Yavin4]

22. Non-Dischargeable Student Loan Debt Says Otherwise

A young person could try to pay back $50,000 in student loans on $14 an hour, or they could just live in another country altogether and never ever have to worry about their debts ever again.

[AverageJoe90]

23. That's not realistic. Let's be frank here.

There are a lot of students in trouble, yes, but I don't see too many people actually leaving the U.S. just for that.

[Yavin4]

24. Student Loan Fugitives

Chris left the country to help pay his debt, not to avoid it. But when that didn't work out, he saw his foreign address as the only way to escape.

Chris (who doesn't want his last name used) graduated with about $160,000 in student loan debt with a master's degree in music.

"At the time I thought I could handle it. I thought the most I'd be paying was $600 a month," he says.

But his payments were $2,400 a month. So Chris started looking for jobs overseas. He thought he'd be able to earn more and pay off his loans. But it didn't turn out that way. His salary was even less than what he was making back home. He realized there was no way he could make his payments, so he changed his address.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/23/pf/college/student_loan_fugitives/index.htm

[AverageJoe90]

36. Okay, I didn't say there weren't any at all......

Still, though, my original argument does still stand; we're just not seeing the massive outflow of fleeing students right now.

[The2ndWheel]

17. Where are they needed?

There's no more sailing west to new worlds. No empty frontiers. The world is full of people and rules.

[Yavin4]

21. South America, Parts of Asia

Even parts of Africa may be more attractive to live and work than the U.S.

People will go where there are opportunities.

[ellisonz]

26. I have many friends who have gone to teach English abroad.

Korea, Japan, and China are big destinations for that.

[Initech]

29. I had a friend from high school who moved to FRANCE because he couldn't get a job here.

I'm thinking I might do the same, not because I have to, I want to get out of this country and experience how the rest of the world functions.

[ellisonz]

27. *Raises hand*

[Creideiki]

31. My partner has Irish dual-citizenship

We're just waiting for them to recognize our relationship.

Then the country is out a computer engineering degree and a master's in math.

My partner's degree is in graphic design.

Ireland and the Eurozone stand to win.