Why are young people in America so frustrated these days? You are about to find out. Most young adults started out having faith in the system. They worked hard, they got good grades, they stayed out of trouble and many of them went on to college. But when their educations where over, they discovered that the good jobs that they had been promised were not waiting for them at the end of the rainbow. Even in the midst of this so-called “economic recovery”, the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall. And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well. At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt. As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.
It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the “bright future” that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie. A lot of young people ultimately give up on the system and many of them end up just kind of drifting aimlessly through life. The following is an example from a recent Wall Street Journal article…
James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as “kind of grim.”
“It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job,” said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. “But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it’s a rough deal.”
Young adults as a group have been experiencing a tremendous amount of economic pain in recent years. The following are 30 statistics about Americans under the age of 30 that will blow your mind…
#1 The labor force participation rate for men in the 18 to 24 year old age bracket is at an all-time low.
#2 The ratio of what men in the 18 to 29 year old age bracket are earning compared to the general population is at an all-time low.
#3 Only about a third of all adults in their early 20s are working a full-time job.
#4 For the entire 18 to 29 year old age bracket, the full-time employment rate continues to fall. In June 2012, 47 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job. One year later, in June 2013, only 43.6 percent of that entire age group had a full-time job.
#5 Back in the year 2000, 80 percent of men in their late 20s had a full-time job. Today, only 65 percent do.
#6 In 2007, the unemployment rate for the 20 to 29 year old age bracket was about 6.5 percent. Today, the unemployment rate for that same age group is about 13 percent.
#7 American families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#8 During 2012, young adults under the age of 30 accounted for 23 percent of the workforce, but they accounted for a whopping 36 percent of the unemployed.
#9 During 2011, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.
#10 At this point about half of all recent college graduates are working jobs that do not even require a college degree.
#11 The number of Americans in the 16 to 29 year old age bracket with a job declined by 18 percent between 2000 and 2010.
#12 According to one survey, 82 percent of all Americans believe that it is harder for young adults to find jobs today than it was for their parents to find jobs.
#13 Incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation since the year 2000.
#14 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger. Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.
#15 In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that they had been in 40 years.
#17 According to the Federal Reserve, the total amount of student loan debt has risen by 275 percent since 2003.
#18 In America today, 40 percent of all households that are led by someone under the age of 35 are paying off student loan debt. Back in 1989, that figure was below 20 percent.
#19 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.
#20 According to the U.S. Department of Education, 11 percent of all student loans are at least 90 days delinquent.
#21 The student loan default rate in the United States has nearly doubled since 2005.
#22 One survey found that 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the “real world” while they were still in college.
#23 In the United States today, there are more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.
#29 Overall, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents according to Time Magazine.
#30 Young Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated that previous generations have saddled them with a nearly 17 trillion dollar national debt that they are expected to make payments on for the rest of their lives.
And this trend is not just limited to the United States. As I have written about frequently, unemployment rates for young adults throughout Europe have been soaring to unprecedented heights. For example, the unemployment rate for those under the age of 25 in Italy has now reached 40.1 percent.
Youth unemployment rates in these countries are upwards of 40% to nearly 70%. The most recent figures published by the Italian government show yet another record high in youth unemployment.
An entire generation is now coming of age without being able to leave the nest or have any prospect of earning a decent wage in their home country.
This underscores an important point that I’ve been writing about for a long time: young people in particular get the sharp end of the stick.
They’re the last to be hired, the first to be fired, the first to be sent off to fight and die in foreign lands, and the first to have their benefits cut.
And if they’re ever lucky enough to find meaningful employment, they can count on working their entire lives to pay down the debts of previous generations through higher and higher taxes.
But when it comes time to collect… finally… those benefits won’t be there for them.
Meanwhile, the overall economy continues to get even weaker.
In the United States, Gallup’s daily economic confidence index is now the lowest that it has been in more than a year.
For young people that are in high school or college right now, the future does not look bright. In fact, this is probably as good as the U.S. economy is going to get. It is probably only going to be downhill from here.
The system is failing, and young people are going to become even angrier and even more frustrated.
So what will that mean for our future?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Aaron Paul, Vince Gilligan and Bryan Cranston of AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad’ (wikimedia commons image: http://tinyurl.com/ogbhmuw)
THE ROVING EYE Breaking American exceptionalism
By Pepe Escobar
Never underestimate American soft power.
What if the US government actually shut down to mourn the passing of Breaking Bad, arguably the most astonishing show in the history of television? It would be nothing short of poetic justice – as Breaking Bad is infinitely more pertinent for the American psyche than predictable cheap shots at Capitol Hill.
Walter White, aka Heisenberg, may have become the ultimate, larger than life hero of the Google/YouTube/Facebook era. In an arc of tragedy spanning five seasons, Breaking Bad essentially chronicled what it takes for a man to accept who he really is, while in the process ending up paying the unbearable price of losing everything he holds dear and what is assumed to be his ultimate treasure; the love of his wife and son.
Along the way, Breaking Bad was also an entomologist study on American turbo-capitalism – with the 1% haves depicted as either cheats or gangsters and the almost-haves or have-nots barely surviving, as in public school teachers degraded to second-class citizen status.
Walter White was dying of cancer at the beginning of Breaking Bad, in 2008. Progressively, he gets rid of Mr Hyde – a placid chemistry teacher – for the benefit of Dr Jekyll – undisputed crystal meth kingpin Heinsenberg. It’s not a Faustian pact. It’s a descent into the dark night of his own soul. And in the end he even “wins”, under his own terms, burning out with a beatific smile.
His secret is that it was never only about the transgressive high of producing the purest crystal meth. It was about the ultimate Outsider act, as in a Dostoevsky or Camus novel; a man confronting his fears, crossing the threshold, taking full control of his life, and finally facing the consequences, with no turning back.
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The US federal government is partially shutting down after the Congress failed to fund its work amid a Republican drive to defund the Obamacare healthcare program. President Obama addressed to US troops to boost their confidence amid the crisis.
RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 1 billion YouTube views benchmark.
Do you still keep a hefty portion of your savings in a U.S. bank?
If so you may want to reconsider your options. Because if the following report from the Institute of Justice is any indication, nothing you hold in private bank account is safe anymore.
Can the government use civil forfeiture to take your money when you have done nothing wrong—and then pocket the proceeds?
The IRS thinks so.
For over 30 years, Terry Dehko has successfully run a grocery store in Fraser, Mich., with his daughter Sandy. In January 2013, without warning,the federal government used civil forfeiture to seize all of the money from the Dehkos’ store bank account (more than $35,000) even though they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.
Their American Dream is now a nightmare.
Federal civil forfeiture law features an appalling lack of due process: It empowers the government to seize private property from Americans without ever charging, let alone convicting, them of a crime. Perversely, the government then pockets the proceeds while providing no prompt way to get a court to review the seizure.
On September 25, 2013, Terry and Sandy teamed up with the Institute for Justice to fight back in federal court. A victory will vindicate not just their right to be free from abusive forfeiture tactics, but the right of every American not to have their property wrongfully seized by government.
Every year the government of the United States seizes tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money and redistributes these funds to “black” projects which are often unaccounted for. On September 10th, 2001, for example, Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the D.O.D. had lost around $2.3 Trillion. The funds were unaccounted for and any investigation into where they went ended the following day when the office holding the records in question was reportedly destroyed in the Pentagon attack.
No one was held to account. No one went to jail. No one was punished.
Make a suspicious transaction or can’t account for your money as a private citizen, however, and they will seize everything you own and treat you like a financial terrorist.
There are no warrants, no charges, no court proceedings. They just take it. And if you don’t comply, they’ll send an IRS SWAT team through your front door and imprison you.
What’s frightening about the experience of Terry and Sandy Dehko is that just months prior to their seizure of their assets the Internal Revenue Service completed an audit indicating that all of their records were legitimate, and their small business was operating within the guidelines of Federal tax law.
We have been covering the Mintchip story since April of 2012 when the Royal Canadian Mint made a commercial advertising it and challenging software programmers to make an app that will be used in conjunction with it. The commercial portrays Mintchip as the ‘evolution of currency’, tries to portray it as our inevitable future. The commercial describes Mintchip as a digital form of currency. Value is recorded on MicroSD cards in smart phones, tablets or laptop/desktop computers because it can also be loaded onto chips found in USB sticks. In the commercial it also states that some future devices might also be compatible with it that are not even invented yet. Click HERE for Mintchip commercial mentioned above.
Jan Hannemann, an app developer, along with many other recipients entered the Mintchip challenge that was portrayed in the commercial. Hannemann’s idea, MintWallet, made him win the grand prize of $50,000 for best application. His goal was to make virtual currency to be “like instant messaging for your wallet.” Using cloud technology and push notifications, users could use MintChips for payments, for literally pretty much anything.
“Winning app MintWallet allows users to send money, or requests for money to other users. It relies on a peer-to-peer network to connect users and allow the transfer of digital cash. It ties in QR codes so every payment request will have a QR code automatically generated. That allows payment usages such as scanning the code at a parking meter to pay for your time at a spot. There’s also a “split the bill” feature so a group eating out together at a restaurant can quickly pay their share without any hassle.”
~ SOURCE
MiniCheckout is another popular choice winner for the MintChip Challenge which allows users with Mintchip technology to scan items they are purchasing from a grocery store (or other place) by taking a picture of the barcode and paying for everything they buy digitally through the smart phone. This kind of correlates to IBM’s commercialwhere it portrays a man just shoving grocery items into his pockets and he just walks out of the store because everything is automatically deducted from his chip.
So what’s the difference between debit cards and mintchip?
by Michael Snyder
We have been covering the Mintchip story since April of 2012 when the Royal Canadian Mint made a commercial advertising it and challenging software programmers to make an app that will be used in conjunction with it. The commercial portrays Mintchip as the ‘evolution of currency’, tries to portray it as our inevitable future. The commercial describes Mintchip as a digital form of currency. Value is recorded on MicroSD cards in smart phones, tablets or laptop/desktop computers because it can also be loaded onto chips found in USB sticks. In the commercial it also states that some future devices might also be compatible with it that are not even invented yet.
PN 