If there is any publication that one can look to as the publication of the bourgeois, nouveau riche of America, who has absolutely NO connection to the common person, there are two places that one can go. The first is Fortune magazine, and the second one is The Atlantic. This publication is the pinnacle of rich people finding things to bitch about. And what do rich boomers like to bitch about? Why Millennials, of course! Because we are making their lives SO much more difficult, aren’t we? I am so goddamn tired of these entitled older generations talking about how much harder we are making things for them. But it seems that now the older generations have decided to openly give us the finger and accuse us of being a generation of liars. Here’s the link to The Atlantic’s article, entitled “The Myth of the Broke Millennial”. Let’s get into this hit-piece.
Even amid this slaughter of tradition, Millennials are best known for another characteristic: how broke they are. Millennials, it’s often said, are the first American generation that will do worse than its parents financially.
All true. When my parents were growing up, you could get a college education while working a part-time job and be in no financial debt. Between 1980 to 2020, the cost of college tuition has gone up 200%, depending on where one is going to school. Private colleges like Harvard and Yale are even worse. Add in the cost of housing skyrocketing like never before, with corps like BlackRock Investments driving the price up by buying homes, making it so that the average earner cannot compete, along with the fact that wages have not kept up with inflation since the 1970s, and you have one of worst generations to be. Millennials have no buying power. Gen Z, who is coming into the workforce, has it even worse. But I’m sure this author is going to shut down my totally uneducated (BA in Journalism) ass down.
The surprise was this: Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.
I am absolutely DYING to know how much of her data was adjusted for inflation. I really am. Especially in contrast with the cost of things like housing and cost of living, not to mention the fact that the average millennial is saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in college debt, which our parents, schools, and entertainment conned us into.
In this, Millennials trace a pattern similar to the Gen Xers before them. Early Gen Xers, too, entered the job market during a recession, and the generation was subject to dire predictions about its economic future (one 1995 book, Welcome to the Jungle, by Geoffrey T. Holtz, described Gen X as the “Impoverished Generation”). But those predictions didn’t hold up after the economy rebounded later in the ’90s. The Great Recession was no doubt a more harrowing experience for young adults than the recession Gen X faced, but the income stagnation that followed it nonetheless lasted only a few years. Over the past half century, the longest period of falling or stagnant wages was from the ’70s to the mid-’90s, when Boomers were young workers. My point is not that Millennials should consider themselves fortunate—I don’t believe that—but rather that economic prospects can change greatly as a generation ages, and especially as it reaches its peak earning years.
Peak earning years? 73.2% of millennials are living paycheck to paycheck. This statement is weapons-grade bullshit, from an author who I used to respect. Two-thirds of my entire generation have less than $5,000 in savings. I love how the title of this article has avocado toast on a golden platter. The egotism of this cunt-rag in making it out like because we can eat a fruit on toast, that means we are magically doing so well. We’re not. This is hard data. Over 2/3 of my generation has little to no savings, and would not be able to survive, financially, if we lose our jobs.
Which, by the way, is something that more and more of us are looking at, now that we are headed into yet-another recession that was born out of our corpo rat government doing fuck all to reign in their corporate owners and them playing with the economy. Like how BlackRock Investments controls $10 trillion in assets. That’s 1/4 of all the money that is currently in circulation on the face of the Earth. The amount of economic transfer from the wealthy has been insane. The richest people in the world are getting astronomically richer. And yeah, some of those have been millennials. Which explains why this moron has such skewed data.
If Elon Musk, and five-hundred of the lowest-earning millennials were done an average of what they all make, then the data would make it look like we are doing fantastic. But that’s why you look at median income instead of averages.
The least fortunate members of the Millennial generation seem better protected economically than those of prior generations: Fewer Millennials were in poverty in 2019 than were Boomers and Gen Xers at the same age (in 1987 and 2004, years in which the economy was likewise strong). For all the talk of America’s tattered social safety net, that net has in some ways been reinforced since Millennials became adults. The Affordable Care Act extended health-care coverage, and federal-government support during the pandemic actually caused poverty to fall in 2020 and 2021, once you account for that support. Whether because of federal social policy, minimum-wage increases in some states, or other factors, poverty is not any more common among Millennials today than it was among previous generations.
This is so stupid. The Affordable Care Act, which was a BIRTHDAY PRESENT to private insurance companies. There is no public option. Your only option is to get private insurance. Companies which will screw over the people they insure with impunity. There are horror stories EVERYWHERE about people who can’t get coverage. The #1 cause of debt in this country is medical debt. My best friend’s girlfriend is dealing with medical debt because the VA refuses to cover her girlfriend’s cancer treatments because they don’t want to admit that it happened while she was on deployment, and her private insurance says that the VA should be covering it. This is the medical institution in this country.
And this rich bitch wants to say that this is a sign of how good Millennials have it? Fuck you! Fuck you, you entitled bitch! And oh yeah, the Feds did SO much to help us during the pandemic. You know, when employers were shutting down and people were losing their jobs and the government gave a couple payments. At least, here in the US. This is another instance where I bet that this woman was looking at averages instead of medians. Many developed nations had their governments come in and do as much as they could to help the citizens during the pandemic. Our government, on the other hand, told us that they would help and then did as little as they possibly could for the American people, while giving as much as they possibly could to the corpos. You know, who own this country and both political parties.
Both house prices and mortgage rates are higher now than in 2020. That’s bad news for Millennials who haven’t yet bought a house but want to do so soon. Nonetheless, many older Millennial homeowners got great deals on their most important purchase, having passed into their 30s during the early 2010s, one of the most fortuitous times to buy a house in recent memory. It was Gen Xers, by and large, who were in their prime home-buying years as the great housing bubble of the aughts inflated, and who went underwater when that bubble popped. People who bought a house in 2005, for instance, saw their home’s value plummet 21 percent over six years, on average, and not regain its purchase price until 2014. Older Millennials, in contrast, were buying into a depressed market that subsequently rebounded; houses bought in 2011, for instance, appreciated 40 percent over the next six years. Almost everyone who bought a house in the U.S. before 2019 saw its value shoot up during the pandemic years. And until the past year, just about all Millennial home buyers were able to lock in mortgage interest rates that were at historic lows.
So let me see if I’m reading this right – a bunch of millennials who were old enough to have money at a time when the housing market was the lowest it has ever been following the 2008 recession, and now those houses are worth a lot. You do realize, moron, that 2011 was 13 years ago. That’s a third of my life ago. That’s a LONG ASS time! And what have we seen in that time? We’ve seen companies like BlackRock Investments buying homes, at prices that no millennial can compete with, to drive the cost of housing up. You doom-scrolled through Zillow lately, rich bitch? I like how this one comedian put it – it looks like the realtors cat fell asleep on the zero key.
Yes, some people got lucky at the exact right time. Know where I was in 2011? In college, being shackled with college debt. Which you conveniently don’t want to talk about. Of course not. That would fuck with this narrative you are dishonestly building, with the soul goal of shitting on the people who you once defended in another book. One that is going in my Goodwill pile, trust and believe. Two-faced snake.
Does debt alter this picture? Millennials are without a doubt more heavily burdened by college loans than previous generations. Black Millennials are particularly likely to carry heavy student-loan balances. But again, the Fed’s analysis already takes that into account: Its wealth figures net out college loans and other debts.
Bullshit! Absolute, weapons-grade bullshit. For starters, I don’t trust our corpo rat government to give an honest appraisal of ANYTHING. They are so in the corpo pocket that they will do anything and everything to not disrupt the corpo power structure in America. We are seeing that now. They are refusing to admit that we’re headed into another recession. Categorically, denials across the board. Our government lies to the people, in order to make themselves look good. So I don’t believe a word they say about how my generation is doing. Especially when there is a financial reason to shit on millennials – because we don’t vote. Gen X and Boomers vote, but we don’t. By and large, we are the least reliable voting block. That is even in respect to Gen Z, who is coming into this world now in a situation where they have virtually no buying power and are desperate to make things better because they see the writing on the wall.
Of course this woman refuses to bring up climate change in all of this. The cost of living, in a world that is radically changing due to climate change. The #1 cause of debt being medical bills, and how many people are forced to start GoFundMe campaigns for them. My best friend had to do that for her girlfriend with her cancer treatments. But hey, according to this twat, they were doing so well and this belief that they aren’t is some canard that is spread by the Internet. That’s where this article is going. This is so horrifically biased and made to shit on us, who this person once defended. I may hate her more than anyone else, right now.
Even the wealth gap that exists today may mean less than it first appears to. Because more Millennials went to college and graduate school, they started their careers later, on average, than Boomers and Gen Xers did. On those grounds alone, one would expect a lag in wealth building. But more education typically means higher lifetime earnings—and thus stronger savings potential as the years go by. Many Millennials are just entering their peak earning years and have more earning power than the generations before them.
73.2% of millennials are living paycheck to paycheck! You disingenuous bitch! Fucking ugh! I’m arguing with someone who did the bare minimum of research to find things to support what she thinks, and that’s it. We’re doing better than the generations before us? You seen what rents are now, you stupid bitch? You seen what groceries are? Gas? College debt? Medical debt? Car bills? You did this stupid ass article with your graphs that look at the BARE MINIMUM of factors, and then wave off the idea that other issues could exist, like college debt, assuring your readers that the Feds accounted for that in their data.
This is such yellow journalism, for someone who was a respectable author once. You and Matt Taibbi should become friends.
“I see ‘Millennials Aren’t Having Babies’ is making the rounds again,” tweeted “pokey pup,” a self-identified Millennial, in November 2021. “No one is getting paid enough, there’s not adequate maternity leave, no one can afford hospital bills, most of us can’t afford a house—like what did you think would happen?” The tweet got more than 120,000 likes and more than 25,000 retweets.
Although Millennials’ economic outlook isn’t so dire as many social-media posts would suggest, something is clearly holding Millennials back from having children—and finances are, indirectly, at least a plausible culprit.
Given how blind you are to reality, I’m sure you’re about to give a stupid and half-reasoned explanation as to why we aren’t having kids that has next to nothing to do with money. Because you’re a biased journalist who is weaving a narrative, rather than trying to tell the truth about what is happening. You and every single other publication, that is making us out to be the enemy of the free world that is killing us.
The balancing act between salaries and child care might be one reason Millennials are having fewer children, and also why some Millennials feel they are not doing as well as their parents. In a 2018 poll by The New York Times, 64 percent of young adults who said they expected to have fewer children than their ideal named “child care is too expensive” as the reason.
Still, this argument shouldn’t be taken too far. If Millennials need to spend more income on child care than previous generations did, they also need to spend less on many other things. After accounting for inflation, the prices of cars, clothing, furniture, toys, and electronics have all fallen in recent decades. These are not, for the most part, minor line items in a family budget—or at least they weren’t in, say, the 1980s.
This person is living in a fantasy world. That’s all I can think about it now. They live in a magical fantasy world that is no less fantastical than the ones the Christians live in. It’s a world of butterflies and rainbows that doesn’t exist in the real world. 73.2% of millennials are living paycheck to paycheck. That’s hard data from Pew Research. If you are living paycheck to paycheck…YOU AREN’T BUYING NICE THINGS BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING MONEY! You stupid cunt-rag! You stupid bourgeois corpo rat bitch! You entitled Gen X fuck! People give Gen X a break, and I have no idea why. Fuck them too. They haven’t done jack shit to help us anymore than their forebearers did. They haven’t done anything to stop corpos fucking over the planet. They haven’t fought for raising wages, which are now so low that in almost every major metropolitan area, you have to make an obscene amount of money just to be able to get by. My fiancee is scared of the idea of something happening to me because with her medical issues that prevent her from working full time, if I died, then she can’t afford to stay here.
This person lives in this delusional world, and I will be damned if I just let it be. There’s this rule with dementia patients – that you don’t correct them when they tell you something that they know isn’t true. You just roll with it because the alternative is that the patient will get upset and potentially violent. But I’m not going to do that with this idiot. I’m going to smash through her delusions and give her some cold hard reality. For people who live paycheck to paycheck, it does not matter if the cost of luxury items has gone down. Because we aren’t buying luxury things anyway because we aren’t able to afford it. What is so goddamn complicated about this that a TINY, sliver amount of research that didn’t have a bias wouldn’t uncover?
The link between family finances and having kids is also weaker than you might think. On average, families with more income actually have fewer kids; those with less income have more kids. A recent paper by the economists Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue showed that states with bigger increases in child-care costs have not seen steeper declines in birth rates—and found, more broadly, that economic factors were not the major driver of falling birth rates. Instead, they concluded, albeit speculatively, that “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults”—that is, generational differences in attitudes—are the primary explanation. Hypothetically, the logic goes, Millennials might want more children, but when they trade off kids versus income, professional success, and other goals, kids get slotted lower than in previous generations.
We want to survive and not be financially destitute. Fun fact – one of the biggest sources of medical debt for women in America is child-birth. Unless you have AMAZING insurance that doesn’t treat you like the boy Oliver asking “please sir, may I have some more?”, you can walk away from that with tens of thousands in medical debt. But yeah, let’s pretend that this isn’t a problem, either. You’ve so conveniently dodged actually looking at all this critically, because you are wearing your bias on your sleeve. This article is pissing me off. Don’t know how much more of this I can take.
Every generation faces financial challenges, including some that its parents’ generation did not. Within every generation, there is hardship, and Millennials are no different. But all in all, this is a generation on the cusp of middle age that looks successful, not lost. So why does the idea persist that Millennials have gotten screwed economically? Why is the narrative around Millennials still so negative and sometimes angry?
I know where this is going, and I’m going to end it here. I can’t take anymore of this stupidity. We think this way because are are desperate. 73.2% of us can barely make ends meet, but I guess you didn’t even pretend to look at that research, you disingenuous yellow journalist. You chose to look at earnings as a whole and that was it. You failed to account for college debt, just brushed that off by saying the Feds assured you that they did, so that’s fine. You didn’t look into the cost of living now, because you didn’t care. You didn’t look into medical debt, because you didn’t care. You didn’t look into the housing situation as of RIGHT NOW, instead choosing to point out how great things were over ten years ago. That’s the research you’ve done.
Her argument is that social media is the reason that we all feel so desperate, because it is all DOOM and GLOOM. Nah, bitch, it’s because we live in a reality where things are getting worse and worse, while the planet is getting hotter and hotter and there is no hope because we have governments on corpo payroll. But hey, you keep your fantasy world. Go fuck yourself.
Until next time, a quote,
“Look, fuck you. Fuck the plane you flew in on. Fuck them shoes. Fuck the socks with the bell on it. Fuck your gay-ass fairy accents. Fuck them cheap-ass cigars. Fuck your yuck-mouth teeth. Fuck your hairpiece. Fuck your chocolate. Fuck Prince William. Fuck the Queen.” – Riley Freeman, The Boondocks
Peace out,
Maverick
Lucien Maverick's Den 