This article shows how entire generations of young people have been 'discarded' by fiscal mismanagement on the part of politicians...
It Can Happen Here: Europe’s Screwed Generation and America’s - Print View - The Daily Beast
by
Joel Kotkin | June 4, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
It Can Happen Here:
In Spain as in Greece, nearly half of the adults under 25 don’t work.
Call them the screwed generation, the victims of expansive welfare states and the massive structural debt charged by their parents.
In virtually every developed country, and increasingly in developing ones, they include not only the usual victims, the undereducated and recent immigrants, but also the college-educated.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy, the focal point of the emerging new economic crisis.
There’s a growing sense of hopelessness in these places, where debt is turning politics into an ugly choice between austerity, which reduces present opportunities, or renewed emphasis on public spending, which all but guarantees major problems in the bond market, and spending promises that can’t be kept.
Many young Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards already have made their moves, with a half million leaving Spain alone last year.
Ireland, which in recent decades actually attracted new migrants, is exporting a thousand people a week.
In recession-wracked Britain, nearly half of the population say they would like to move
elsewhere.
Driving this exodus is a growing perception that this collapse is not cyclical but secular.
Increasingly, young Europeans are deciding not to start families—the key to future growth—in reaction to the recession.
This demographic implosion makes sense given the legacy left behind by the boomers, who have held on to generous jobs and benefits but left little opportunity for their children, not to mention a high tax burden on what opportunities they do find.
College debt is crushing many young people with degrees—particularly those outside the sciences and engineering—that are not easily marketable.
The spiking number of people in their 30s working as unpaid interns reflects this erosion of opportunity.
This has happened even as the price tag for college has shot up; 94 percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree now owe money for their educations, compared to 45 percent two decades ago.
Forced to take lower wages if they can find work at all and facing still-expensive housing in those markets where many of the jobs are, roughly one in five American adults 25 to 34 now live with their parents—almost double the percentage from 30 years ago.
Increasingly both Wall Street and green “progressives” urge young people to abandon home ownership for a poorer, more crowded life in expensive, high-density apartment blocks.
In the U.S., everything from government jobs to employment in auto factories and even supermarkets is now on a two-tier track, with older workers’ guaranteed pensions and higher salaries not shared by newer hires.
Pensions represent a bigger generational issue than salaries do.
The European welfare state lifetime guarantees are so extensive, and unsustainable, that even the über-frugal Germans are calling for a special tax on younger workers to fund their parents’ pensions.
This generational transfer will likely be accelerated by an aging electorate.
In Europe, east Asia, and America alike, the left and the right have both proven unprepared or unwilling to address the fundamental growth crisis facing the next generation.
The developed world’s youth shouldn’t expect much help from an older generation that has preserved its generous arrangements at the cost of increasingly stark prospects for its own progeny.
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Linkj:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/04/it-can-happen-here-europe-s-screwed-generation-and-america-s.html?obref=obinsite
