By Tyler Durden at theantimedia.org
Millennials have now overtaken Baby Boomers as America’s largest living generation according toPew Research. Millennials as defined by Pew as ages 18-34 now number 75.4 million, slightly edging out Baby Boomers (ages 51-69) numbering 74.9 million.
Millennials also have a few other things going for them, however not in a good way.
As the WSJ reports, Millennials in New York City are earning about 20% less than the previous generation of workers, and they are absolutely drowning in $14 billion in debt.
The average working 23-year old in New York City earned $23,543 compared to $27,731 in 2000 (adj. for inflation). Moving up the age scale a bit, the average 29-year old made $50,331 in 2014 versus $56,026 in 2000.
Another point worth mentioning in the article is that nationwide, the percentage of millennials living independently (read: not in their parents house) has fallen from 51% in 2007, to just 45% in 2014.
In summary, people from 18-34 are going to college, getting into debt, entering into the workforce at minimum wage, and living with their parents. The very definition of the American dream isn’t it? Imagine if Obama hadn’t saved the world’s economy, as he so humbly said he did.
Of course all of this speaks to what we discuss repeatedly on Zero Hedge. The economy is weak, the only jobs being created are primarily waiter and bartender jobs, and the fed is fueling a enormous student loan credit bubble.
As much as the Baby Boomer generation likes to criticize Millennials for being lazy or unskilled, it was under their watch that the stage was set for their children and grandchildren to be screwed by bad economic policies enacted by corrupt politicians — that they voted for.
Now, courtesy of years of mismanaged policies and incompetence, millennials have to face the consequences directly.
This article (Millennials Aren’t Lazy, We’re Hurting Because the Baby Boomers Screwed Us Over) originally appeared on ZeroHedge.com and was used with permission. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credit: Jack Newton. Help us fix our typos: [email protected].
If you are reading this article please watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4IjTUxZORE
Bullshit. This happened to us Gen Xers back in the early 90s. My student loan interest is $508/month..I borrowed $65,000 I owe $107,000. I am a teacher and couldn’t get a job for 10 years. There’s just way more of you than were us and now people are more aware due to social media.
Watched the video and in a sad way loved it. Great youth are our millennials. You are just as good as your parents or better. I’m a grumpy old 55 year old who has all the advantages you talk about. I live in London UK but I try to have a global perspective. I have 11 nieces and nephews who are just talented hard working people like all of you.
We in many ways had the tail end of the post 2nd war boom and rise in consumer goods. Those manual jobs have gone to other countries where labour is cheaper. (Fault no1) However they also need work and living standards fit for humanity.
You are the best educated, most connected, most informed class of people ever on this planet. Humbly I would suggest your jobs are about redefining how this planet is run. First of all thing GLOBAL, not financial control global from USA but what does 7.2B soon to be 10B by 2050 need? We are short of 2.7 billion homes globally. Why is there any unemployment anywhere on this planet. Build the arguments young people just as your grandparents did after devastating 2nd world war and they changed this planet. Copy your grandees. Change our planet, don’t abuse any section or culture. If I get free healthcare, the planet gets free health care. Global wages based on skills. If I get a house with sanitation, heating, kitchens and bathrooms etc, so does every family on the planet.
Your job is to re-invent our global community without letting Governments divide us and control us. This is the equivalent of a third non violent world war and only you can do it. Oldies like me will follow you and support you but you have to make the running. Do not worry about mistakes, we all have made them. Others will appear and help you.
Yes you text to much especially while walking along the street….I’m the grumpy oldy…LOL
Create your space by lifting every person on this planet out of poverty to free life long education and skill acquisition. Love you all. Have courage. Your generation are way better than ours. We know it.
Ive said many times before that, as a millennial, I have to wait about 20-30 years for the world to really change. Why is that? Because right now the men and women who makes laws, dictate policy, currently run the world are all around 50,60 years old. 20-30 years from now the current ruling class will die off, or move out of power and all the 20,30 year old people living today will naturally take their place in the power structure and the policies of our generation will finally be able to be implemented. So the world can change, it is just going to take a while before a different set of ideals can get into power
Bull, your generation already outnumbers boomers (see the graph above).
And you won’t magically be able to better anything more than any other generation. There is very, very little new under the sun. Especially, when y’all embrace socialism which has been proven time and again to be a nonviable, unsustainable from of government. History just keeps repeating itself.
Sorry, the problem is millennials vote for idiot progressive politicians that are dead set on destroying this country. WAKE UP!
Are you serious? Who in the hell pays for free? I do you moron. Been busting my ass since I was 13 years old, on my own, created my own success. Global wages based on skill? Fine. If you are bitching that you cannaot support your many children on minimum wage flipping burgers, why in the hell did you breed in the first place. so freaking sick and tired of hearing all this bitching. Invest at least as much effort in improving your own life.
There are lots of high paying jobs out there . The problem is people are ignoring them and going tend of thousands in debt to get a cookie cutter degree . My company keeps a permanant help wanted sign up for a job that starts at 61000 a year . And yet we cant fill the positions because the industry is short 48000 workers . All the skilled trades are desperate for help .
What a fuckin retarded article this is. Little lazy cocksuckers blaming everyone else. What a JOKE.
Exactly DD … and what Anonymous seems be saying is that Boomers are not welcome here. Not a smart move. It used to be Boomers blamed their parents – the Silent Generation (not their grandparents), Gen X blamed their parents – Boomers (not their grandparents). And yet Millennials apparently do NOT hold their Gen X parents accountable but rather their Grandparents? Take responsibility … Duck is 200% right …
Not all millenials are pansies raised by helicopter parents. It just seems that way.
The title of the article alone describes millenials; “it’s not our fault”. Guess what? It is. You can blame the economy, your parents, a different generation of people entirely but who makes the choices in your life? You do. No one is making you go into debt for college to take an entry level job. There are plenty of skilled apprenticeships for good paying, skilled work that need to be filled but millenials are either above that sort of work, or too lazy to do it. You don’t even want to shift your own cars anymore, why would you want to pick up a hammer or drill and make a good honest living? Go to college, get your degree in nothing applicable to the current job market, move back in with mommy and daddy, and complain that life isn’t fair.
Welcome to life dude.
As always it is someone else’s fault! Your generation is not the first, or only one to have it tough! In the 1960’s I started out at .75$ and hour. I didn’t like it, the work sucked. BUT, I got training g in something (besides fast food) and worked my way up the ladder. NEWS FLASH I (and all others) did NOT start at the top! Stop your whining and do something POSITIVE!! The world owes you zip — no matter how much you cry!! If you need a role model look at the generations from the 1930s and 1940s!!! THEY ARE THE BEST EXAMPLE YOU WILL EVER FIND!
Okay let’s have a little perspective on this. Every generation thinks the previous generation screwed them over. This generation was born between 1982 and 1998. Let’s look a little at what happened just before that time and during that time that had them screwed over:
1. It was their parents who had 20% interest rates and high double digit unemployment rate.
2. It was their parents that had to wait in line for gas during the Oil embargo.
3. It was the baby boomers who were able to prosper and give us Apple, Starbucks and Microsoft.
4. Whether good or bad, I am sure alot of people who are ‘millennials’ had families who prospered from the Reagan years, which by the way is what we are feeling now.
5. As ‘millennials’ walk by that homeless Vietnam Vet, try to think about what a real war entailed and the results of that.
6. It was not the baby boomers who started the ‘.com’ bubble that blew up in most peoples face.
We need to stop blaming past generations for the problems and start fixing the problems. Every generation has had to go through problems and the reason those problems were fixed were because people stood up and fixed them. The problems that didn’t get fixed still exist and are still ignored which is the reason they are not fixed.
The baby boomers also inherited the most wealth from their Depression era parents. They are about to leave their children much less. Witness the proliferation of reverse mortgages. Having been born in 1964, the very end of the boomer time, I have grown up very much in their shadow. They drove EVERYTHING (fashion, music, the economy, politics). They graduated and went into university with little to no student loans (I paid mine at 12.5%) back in the 1980s. Many of the boomers have had long careers and end up in lofty administrative positions…..ask yourself why public sector and crown corporation work places are so top-heavy with admin. However, they ARE dying off very slowly (they are also the healthiest generation ever). They will leave the world a much worse place than the one the enjoyed.
Depression era parents, you don’t seem to understand the word depression, look it up, also wouldn’t hurt for you to Google, “Hardships during the 1930’s” and see what real suffering is like. Try a site like, https://www.google.ca/search?q=the+rich+jumping+out+windows+during+“the+great+depression”&client=tablet-android-bell-ca&prmd=ivn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw8tmR3fvVAhXs54MKHaUZAn4Q_AUIESgB&biw=1024&bih=768 or https://www.facinghistory.org/mockingbird/firsthand-accounts-great-depression They didn’t blame other generations. Oh, they also had no money to pass on to their children fuzz they were broke, btw. Get over it muffin!!
Copy full links as the whole link is not clickable in the article.
Hey, things are tough now for EVERYONE not just “your” generation. Cry me a river.
More policy reining in the multinationals is needed. They’re destroying everything.
Sorry my generation would lambaste your entitled baby boomer asses but we cant afford cable or internet or housing. Bullshit. Dont wprry your fake ass food because your lazy asses couldnt even cook will die of cancer.
We keep hearing how we older generations didn’t look after the planet for the future generations.
It’s all our fault right? We, the older ones didn’t care, right.
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment.
The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, “We didn’t have this ‘green thing’ back in my earlier days.”
The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
The older lady said that she was right — our generation didn’t have the “green thing” in its day. The older lady went on to explain:
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But, too bad we didn’t do the “green thing” back then.
We walked up stairs because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.
But she was right. We didn’t have the “green thing” in our day.
Back then we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day.
Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.
But she’s right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a r azor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.
But we didn’t have the “green thing” back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the”green thing.” We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the “green thing” back then?
We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off… Especially from a tattooed, multiple pierced smartass who can’t make change without the cash register telling them how much.