Are We Screwed?

What do you mean, "the first" generation? More like the second or third consecutive generation to get screwed.

As a child of the Carter administration, let me say - many of us saw the writing on the walls you're talking about 25-30 years ago.

-=zen=-

PEROT would say the great sucking sound of our factories continue flowing south of border and beyond ...

People are forced 2 do jobs they are not PASSIONATE about...jobs they don't live 4...jobs they don't enjoy. This is why people are unhappy.... ***SCHOOL SHOULD BE FREE!!!*** All opertunities should be FREE!!!! ....... Press is separated 'cause the press spreads Truth(the disease 2 liers). ..... I hope we get a current cafe in Marietta, OH soon! So I have the ability 2 put up my voice instead of only my words.

Yeah, we're a little screwed. Wages are dropping and prices are rising. The flood of easy credit has screwed up natural free-market forces. What was normally (naturally) supposed to happen when wages fall and jobs dry up is that consumer spending drops too and prices drop. Well, thanks to new rules governing credit cards (and, of course, the subprime mortgage industry) introduced a while back -- that didn't happen. Wages were falling, but people were able to use credit to keep spending -- which kept prices high while real wages were simultaneously dropping. Unfortunately a "correction" is in our near future. Basically, the bottom has to fall out in order to get prices to re-set lower to become more inline with actual wages (not wages plus credit cards). It's going to suck but it's probably for the best. Prices can't keep rising forever. Look at how out of control they are now. A brand new house in 1976 cost $60,000. That exact same house today (with a leaky roof and no improvements) sells for $450,000! College text books: 20 years ago a new college text book was $20 and now a single book is $95.00! Prices have to comeback down to reality.

AND in RESPONSE 2 the question at hand "Are we screwed? Will we be the first generation economically worse off than our parents? " YES!!! We have surrounded our life w/ costs...everything we NEED(food, water, shelter, passion) & want(things 2 achieve passion or things 2 experience/understand) with a price...what about those who have no money 2 begin w/?....Then there is no choice but 2 do a job that has no real meaning 2 us...no passion...just 2 get a little money 2 pay 4 the things we need & hope we have some left 2 achieve our passion(schooling needed)...usually all the money earned in these non-passionate jobs go twards bills...& prevent us from getting the schooling/proof of knowledge 2 do our passion w/out limitation....NOT GOOD!!! If we stay like this crime rate WILL go up...'cause if people can't afford what they need....they find another way 2 get it(stealing, lieing, etc.) Doing things they know are wrong 2 get the right....doing bad 2 get good....THIS IS WHAT THE COUNRTY IS TEACHING OUR KIDS....'cause there are many w/out money....I am one of those people who have no money...and I do not want 2 do bad/wrong things...so I'm stuck....I can only sing & dance & hope someday some1 will c the passion in my writting of art & let me do it w/out haveing 2 deal w/ money(the idol, the system of control, the thing worked 4 that isn't liveing)....I do apoligize if this is hard 2 read....I tend 2 get caught up and ramble...'cause I am so passionate about true meaning of FREEDOM...and this country has forgotten the true meaning of what it stands by...since nothing is free except for our thoughts & death(but even a funeral has a price) SO I guess our thoughts would be the only thing left that they can't put a price on. *Pure TRUTH*True PEACE*Total LOVE/UNDERSTANDING*

One thing that strikes me about this generation is that it seems to accept everything at face value and lacks the foresight to question any of it - unemployment statistics for example.

Do you realize that the government does not count the unemployed in the same manner it did say 10, 20 or 30 years ago? What effect might that have on your perception of reality and why would the government do that?

You think your parents had it good? That's a serious joke! I'll illustrate an example of how people's perception is wrong: in the early 1960's, my father owned three houses; two on the Monterey Peninsula and one still under construction in a new housing tract in Silicon Valley - as a skilled blue collar worker. He didn't have credit cards, he didn't have 2nd and 3rd mortgages, he owned a new car, had money in the bank and his wife didn't, nor did she "need" to work. He was able to make his monthly "nut" with his income with some to spare.

Wealth since the Regan era has been "virtual" or plastic - for the most part, built substantially on inflation not production with the proliferation of credit cards and other forms of credit.

When I entered the work force, in the 1980's, it was a completely different United States economically than my father experienced. As the '80's marched on and $50,000.00 a year salaries became more common, and boy did that sound like a lot of money then, it still didn't buy what my father's (un-inflated) income purchased a number of years earlier.

Jobs go to India and manufacturing to China because our government no longer protects Americans and the American economy in the manner it had for the previous 200 years.

We are flooded with China made junk because our government no longer protects American businessmen in the manner it had for the previous 200 years.

Sorry, didn't watch the whole pod and I didn't care for it.

Why haven't we heard anything about education... Thats what I'm interested in. I'm paying my way through college and it's not cheap. My old college had an average class of 35 - 40 students due to the fact that a bill was passed taking alot of money away from education closing down many classes at a near- bye university leaving our parking lots full and classes even more packed. going into my BFA at MECA I'm already $5,000 in debt. School is $32,000 a year and fafsa only helps so much. What's going on with the education?!

could the ever increasing size and the resultant cost of the various bureaucracies have anything to do with our dwindling resources? each of the 60% of our current wage earners lose over half of their income to TAXES
the wealth of our nation is being squandered with frivolous government largess and waste, and the race is still on to see how much each of these thieves can garner for their personal benefit,be it either publicity or personal gain.

Education is a huge problem -- kids are paying for college with Visa and Mastercard. We need government intervention with high education. Textbooks! My goodness. 2+2=4 since the dawn of time so why are colleges requiring the purchase of new textbooks every year? How exactly is it determined that a text book is "worth" $300 for freshman college classes? Who came up witht hat price and why? Someone needs to stand up to colleges and say, "Hey! You're ripping people off!" The government needs to intervene. A better educated citizenery is a boon for the entire nation. Educating the next person who will cure cancer is a good thing -- denying them the tools needed to make the cure happen because they've maxed out their credit cards is just short sighted.

Angelique - you're right about our society teaching people to be immoral, to "take what you can get." It is a disease.

It is the leadership that sets the example and tone of what's acceptable in a given society. In this case, with complicity of the judicial and legislative branches, this executive brand administration is for the dogs.

Some people create while others destroy. Some people give while others take. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out which to greater and greater extent rules our country.

Ipo - you're right about that. What's funny is that our elected officials when talking about the high costs of education and the debt accumulated by students after four years of college refer to numbers like $20,000.00 and $30,000.00, when in reality the truth is $50,000.00 to over a $100,000.00. It's seems difficult for any of them to get it right - or admit the truth.

Yep. We're screwed. We have the double whammy of stagnant wages and rising fixed cost: in housing, health care, child care, gas. Most of the jobs created during the Bush years are minimum wage service jobs with no benefits. Most of the good paying jobs have gone over to India, Pakistan, China. And this time around, a college degree hasn't made much of a difference. While Bush and his Republicans keep insisting that giving tax cuts to the rich is the answer.

In November, voters have a choice. Vote for the Democratic nominee. Even if it is Hillary Clinton. I did not and still don't like her war votes. But at least when it comes to the economy, they know how to generate wealth for the middle class.

Yeah, we're screwed- BUT disgruntled people and ridiculous and abusive government throw together are the recipe for revolution. At least the wool that's been covering most of the nation's eyes is getting shorn.

This is a sad way of explaining reality here to the younger viewers, but no one says it better than George Carlin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTfcAyYGg

-zen

amen, again, zenbeer..... i'm 62 and have been through many "recessions" and tough times at work........ but the things complained about in the pod aren't the right things... they're the media-driven worries that cause people to make the wrong decisions..................... if i buy a house with a mortgage, i've got a debt. it used to be the rule of thumb that one should buy a home that amounted to three or four times their annual salary.......... that's a huge debt........... and the same goes for the country as a whole............................ when i started work, i immediately got a job that paid more per year [gross] than my dad EVER made in his life on a yearly basis.... but i had a college degree and he barely finished high school................... the crap about shipping jobs overseas is just that, too..... Perot's "giant sucking sound" shipped low-tech, manual-labor jobs to countries where labor is cheaper. that freed up untold numbers of dollars for everyone in the country have been able to purchase items for less dollars than they would have paid an American worker to make....... that means that HUGE numbers of Americans benefitted from the "loss" of a much smaller number of jobs........... ............ i've complained that i, too, have been screwed because i could not own an IRA until ten or fifteen years into my earning career.................. it would have made a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars in my IRA accounts today that i don't have................. money i could be spending on clothes, cars, food, necessities and luxuries which would employ people all over the place!................................... if you want to carp about balance of trade and that crap, you've just drawn the border around the country............. why not draw it around a state? why don't our candidates worry about the trade imbalance between New York and California, or West Virginia and Florida??????? or between your county or parrish and the one in the next state, or between your city and the one down the road................................

next, if you're worried about the cost of your college education, first, graph it versus the cost of living or anything else you want, and you'll see that it's gone up faster than any other nearby measure.............. what the heck does THAT tell you?!?!??......... maybe they're charging too much because people ARE getting too many scholarships and paying on credit where they shouldn't have been able to pay at all?!?!?!? it's still called supply and demand...................... raise prices and more people keep coming........ so raise prices some more............ if more people take out loans and swipe their plastic to pay for it, they AIN'T GONNA LOWER PRICES............................... tell me how to fix that, please?.................... Mitt's right... the political machine in washington IS broken, but nobody's willing to make ANY HARD DECISIONS to change any of the fundamental processes which got us here...... everything is spend, spend, spend, as if that'll fix everything....... but to spend, you need the money, and there's only two ways to get it: print it [=> inflation = bad] or tax it [=> less to spend the way YOU want to spend it, but nice for political power, lobbyists, etc...] ................................... i promise you that, no matter who's elected this fall, all of the hopes you have for "major change" will not be met....................................... and four years hence, you'll be looking for change and improvements again.................. my first vote was for Eisenhower. I've been looking for someone worth voting for ever since.................. i haven't found any.................. good luck to you.

No, Mitt is NOT right, and let me tell you why. First of all, everyone who wants to go to college and has the grades that qualify, SHOULD BE ABLE TO GO TO COLLEGE. Regardless of their parent's income! Why should the economic class someone is born into, determine whether or not they get to go to college or not? This isn't Russia. This isn't Pakistan. This is America! Supply and demand doesn't have anything to do with a child's education. A young person's future isn't a commodity to be bought or sold.

And secondly, the reason why the United States treasury doesn't have any money to do anything for the American people right now, including giving student loans and grants to young people, is because BUSH SPENT IT ALL ON TAX CUTS FOR RICH PEOPLE!

Rich people like Romney. And war profiteers like Halliburton. Did you know that oil companies paid zero income taxes last year? They raked in record profits, mind you. How is this legal? It's not. But they have their powerful lawyers, and Bush is more than happy to let them get away with it.

So if they skirted out of paying their fair share of taxes, guess who has to make up the difference? You and I and everybody reading this thread. Just check your tax returns for the last seven years. You will see that your taxes have steadily gone up, not down, since Bush took office. To make up for his oil cronies robbing our treasury.

And lastly, don't you DARE tell young people not to vote again! Don't you dare spread that lie that their votes won't make a difference. They have already done so in primaries and will continue to do some come November 2008!

It is people like you that discourage them, in order to suppress their vote. While you sent them and their friends off to war to die for Bush's lies. You tell them to give up hope so that old farts like you can vote in the Republican party that has nothing to offer our youth, the average middle class citizen, and anybody who's not making $250,000 per year and above. I understand why rich people vote for the Republicans. But I'll never understand why regular Americans do. It's like the chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.

Well, guess what. This thread is about young people's lives and how they've been adversely affected by Bush's economy for the last 7 years. They have every right to make this an election year issue because they understand very well what is at stake here - their futures, their careers and their vitality.

And don't you dare try to take away their voice!

um, phoenix_fire999, that diatribe wasn't directed at me, was it? because if it was, i feel very sorry for you............ first, while a AM old and DO fart, i don't think i'm an "old fart."..........
when you say things like This Isn't Russia right after things like this.......... "First of all, everyone who wants to go to college and has the grades that qualify, SHOULD BE ABLE TO GO TO COLLEGE. Regardless of their parent's income! Why should the economic class someone is born into, determine whether or not they get to go to college or not? This isn't Russia. This isn't Pakistan." ....................... it's really scary, because IN RUSSIA OR ANY REAL SOCIALIST COUNTRY, YOU WOULD GO TO COLLEGE INDEPENDENT OF YOUR ABILITY TO PAY................ that's the whole idea of socialism and communism.......... ownership by the state or the community. "to each according to his need" if you didn't read or remember that part of your schooling, you young fart.................. and you can [no you can't] see what good it's done all of those countries in terms of standard of living, etc............................... if you've still got any non-religious openings in your opinions, try this page and try to read maybe half of it at least.... http://www.plusaf.com/soapbox/flattax.htm ................. read about who pays the most taxes and who makes the most income. there are multiple sources which corroborate the data, unlike where you probably learned your "truths." ............. there are lots of reasons why "higher education" is so expensive today, and a lot of it correlates with massive building up of campus infrastructure, some professors' salaries [the ones that lecture that big business = bad for you], plus the increasing subsidies and scholarships that ARE available today................ you might try reading REASON magazine for a year or so, instead of Das Kapital............ ........... and i don't like ANY of the candidates of ANY of the "major parties" either.......... Ron Paul comes pretty close for me, and i don't agree with everything HE says, either. .............. and as for taxes and such, when the government does anything to try to help or stimulate the economy, the effects DON'T SHOW UP FOR AT LEAST ONE YEAR.... MAYBE TWO............. and that's usually long enough to let people blame the next president or congress for the damage............ milton friedman showed that in an article in ... i think it was Newsweek... maybe 20 years ago......... they didn't believe him then; you won't believe him now..... enjoy .

yea we are screwed. our runaway spending is going to kill us. as a society we've all been living way beyond our means for years and years and we're about to pay a big price for it. we've never been in greater debt than ever before and i'm not even talking about the govt'. personal debt has never been higher and it's going to require a real change in attitude about personal saving and spending to help dig each of us out.

right, gerald miller! ...................... i recently had the realization that if someone starts using credit cards to pay for normal, recurring bills, they may easily reach what i can call a "tipping point" beyond which their monthly credit card payment MINIMUM goes UP, not DOWN........... a doomsday point of no return. the credit-card companies love the higher interest rates and penalties for late payments, but eventually, if your minimum payment gets high enough, you don't have enough money left from your paycheck to buy the gas it takes to go to work!............ you're doomed..................... and there's NO easy way to break this death-spiral............... you're right... a change in attitude can do it, but it only helps those BELOW the "tipping point." ..................... i wish everyone had bank accounts like mine at Wachovia............ my checking, savings and Visa account are basically ONE "pool of money." ..................... if i write a check, it debits the pool.......... if i charge something to my plastic card, in a day or two, the plastic is paid off.... FROM THE POOL........... if i don't keep the pool filled to some comfortable level, my water, gas, electric, ISP, cable, phone, cell phone city taxes and ALL other AUTOMTIC payments don't get made........... if more people did that thirty years ago, few would be in this kind of mess today................................... so, how do we get them out?........................ i make one vote: educate 'em in high school so they don't put their foot in the trap in the first place. i don't know how to help the ones drowning now. if i donate to them, i'll drown, too.

Who do you mean by "we?"

I'm in my late 40's and my parents were better off economically than my spouse and I are. I get the feeling that our kids will do even less well going forward.

"We" meaning young people. The 30 and under crowd. Yoohoo! 30 right here.

And yes we are royally screwed! Supremely and utterly screwed! I hope all those Bush voters are proud of themselves now. They have just screwed themselves and their children out of prosperity, economic fairness and even a properly functioning Democracy. Right now, we have a gutted Constitution, a soaring defecit in the trillions - which will take our children and grandchildren to pay off, millions college graduates unable to find good paying jobs and instead have to settle for Starbucks and bagging groceries. Those college-degree jobs have went overseas to India. But that's not enough for Bush's corporate cronies. They have to cheat us out of our house and home too with their subprime ponzi schemes and ARM loans. And many of us know friends or even family, who are still getting maimed and killed in Iraq. and if they're lucky enough to survive a roadside bombing, the rat infested Walter Reed hospitals (Halliburton) will take care of them. NOT! And if you complain about any of this, you're probably on some FBI watch list somewhere, because Bush has wiretapped your phone conversations.

Things haven't been this bad for America's youth since the Great Depression! Thanx a lot, Bush voters! I hope you got the gay bashing you voted for. Because the rest of us, including your kids, got *&^% up the ass instead. But I'm sure that was all worth it to you.

You Rethuglican voters ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

phoenixfire_999: Look up "Generation Joshua." They campaigned for Bush in large numbers all over the country and most of them aren't even old enough to vote. Bush's success in 2000 and 2004 is not an age issue....it's a Party and Christian issue.

Agreed. Keen observation, barkway.

The rightwing churches are a sham. I feel that way about most religions, but certainly about "Christianity" today. They're nothing but microphone pieces for Bush and his Rethuglicans. It has nothing to do with the true teachings of their idol, Jesus. If it did, their believers will be giving money away to the poor in droves and championing peace instead of war. These sham churches are nothing but money milking machines on the unsuspecting believer. They use fear, guilt and cultish social disapproval to control people. It's not hard to see why they target youth and children. Hitler once said, "you give me a child for the first 7 years of his life and I give you the man."

It's a sick religion. It has been and always will be. I suspect that's why 1 in 5 youths are atheists today. We are starting to see through the bullshit in larger and larger numbers. (Maybe there is a God!) And many more are turned off by the traditional rightwing churches of Pat Robertson and instead are opting for other spiritual options.

back to phoenix_fire999, again.................. some point-by-points...... the jobs that have left the United States are low-education-required, "muscle-power-jobs" for the most part. it would have been obvious to any critical-thinking person decades ago that this would happen. in addition, as even I figured out in roughly 2002, any job that doesn't need your body to BE THERE to do it in person [examples: programmers versus house-painters] can and will go to the cheapest, brightest countries..... and this was made possible almost completely by the advent of the world wide web. and there's no turning back. .......... if your high school advisors didn't figure that out before you graduated high school, and you didn't figure that out before choosing your college major, you need only focus your blame on the US education system, traditionally geared to creating "non-critical-thinking" manufacturing-job-focused graduates...... and who runs those schools? the government, for the most part.......... ...... next, while there was quite a bit of fraud in the subprime-mortgage fiasco of the past years, keep in mind that many of the foreclosures will happen to people who got their "economics" education at the hands of public-school teachers and administrators, .... people who never should have been qualified for any kind of mortgage at all at the time...... and recent reports have shown that many states tried to put laws into place to make those kinds of predatory loans unlikely by moving risk to the lenders, and guess who nullified those laws.... a branch of the US Government...... [also known as stupidity in action plus the Law of Unintended Consequences...]......... if you think it's anything like the Great Depression now, find a living grandparent or great-grandparent and ask them. it's NOTHING like that now, no matter how bad you feel about it. ........... unemployment wasn't 5%, it was more like 15-20%........ AND the US Government exacerbated the situation [made it worse] by passing some of the dumbest "protectionist" laws, embargos and taxes that the world ever has seen....... prolonging a nasty recession into a long Depression which, in some part, has often been blamed for the rise of Nazism and the Second World War itself!........... all brought to you by the best government "thinkers" of the time. ......... and finally, for now, most of the crap you're blaming on the republican party is the result of government policies which have created a generation or three of teat-sucking complainers who nag for more and more handouts and help from the government, whiich i see as the CAUSE of the problems, not the CURE you think it is..... read this for an example.... http://www.plusaf.com/soapbox/cow-econ.htm#catchingpigs .............. you've been caught, pig..... how's it feel??? like you've been screwed?....... well if you read that link, you'll know who really screwed you, and it's not the rich, not the republicans and not alot of other folks you've been blaming most of your life.......................

plusaf: EXACTLY. This is the cost of moving from an Industrial economy to a consumer spending economy and one where jobs are mainly reliant on high tech (and like you said, our schools have stayed trapped in the Agricultural Age in terms of their schedules adn the Industrial Age in terms of curriculum). I tell ya, young people are going to get hurt bad when they are saddled with HUGE college debts and no education or training for the available jobs. They will have to move overseas to get employed (unless they want to pick vegetables, clean toilets, or flip hamburgers).

Okay guys, wait a second. I agree things are looking a little bleak right now, but let's not shit ourselves okay? Every generation is saddled with a few challenges. Perhaps overcoming debt, overhauling our economy, and instating something like a universal right to education and health care in the States is ours?

Instead of pointing the finger or blaming everyone from the church to high school teachers to Republicans to Democrats why can't someone actually come up with an idea to start DEALING with these issues- instead of moaning about it.

I believe globalization is inevitable and those manufacturing jobs would have gone out of the country eventually regardless of whose in office. Perhaps we should try to gear our country torwards developing green, nano, interactive technology? Rebuild our crumbling infastructure and construct now sources of clean energry. Something like a Green New Deal for our generation. We can't think about fixing education and healthcare until our economy is flipped right side up again.

LostAtSea: One way that students are dealing with the education/loan crisis is they are choosing to study abroad for all four years and some even graduate years too. It's cheaper, and they have reported they got a better education for the money. American college students have also found their textbooks available overseas for 50% of what they cost here.

to LostAtSea...... re: "According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose 228 percent from 1979 through 2005. ".................. hello, i'm one of them.... and what the heck do you think the cost of living did between 1979 and 2005........ i got out of college with a BSEE in 1968. my starting salary ]gross] was about $9,000 a year. ......... i worked for that company for ten years, moved to another company in 1978 [pretty close to '79, ok?] and started there at about $24,000 [gross]. ....... ten years. percent increase? want to call it 167%................... i worked for the second company for 24 years and was bought out [ie, kicked out by a lousy management team... see my website... ] and the last paychecks i was getting were roughly at the $120,000 a year level......... gee..... want to call that a 400% increase????? now do the math on the percent increase in my salary over 34 years, from 9k a year to 120k......... on average, my raises were roughly equal to the increase in the cost of living. i consider myself to have started out in the upper-middle class and ended up in the upper-middle class.................... i made enough money to pay off the FICA deduction before the end of the calendar year................ and thanks to our government, i never paid it off earlier than September or later than November........... and that varied with the tax rates from year to year......... a heck of a lot to show for 34 years' earnings.... if it had gone from December to November to October to September over the years, i would have thought that i was getting "ahead of the curve" but that never happened.......... have a nice life.....

Good report Adam. Makes you want to add a response.
I think it has to do with the strong influence of the right wing. And if the people voted with their pocketbook instead of their heart, we'd have a society that talked more and fought less.
As John Grisham put it when he was interviewed by Bill Moyers last Friday...
BILL MOYERS: What is your understanding of why these good Christian folks, these so many Baptists voted for the party that is in fact the party of money.

JOHN GRISHAM: They live poor and vote rich. They live poor and vote rich. I mean, it's a-- effort to-- the brilliant things the Republicans did was get all these guys under one tent. From your traditional Republican base-- wealthy republicans, your country club Republicans-- your corporate Republicans, and bring in the NASC