
What is it with the kids today? Young Americans are putting off most if not all of the major goalposts of modern life that were so much easier in the past. Many young Americans are postponing or not having children at all, for a number of reasons including anxiety about climate change. Most cannot afford to buy a house or even a car. Real income adjusted for inflation has remained the same for over 50 years. Often a rosy rear view mirror of golden hued nostalgia can make it seem like things were better in the past. In many ways, at least economically things really were better. According to the Pew research center the average hourly wage of 1973 at $4.03 had the same purchasing power of today’s average wage of $28.16. The current pay may sound good for those of us that remember the past but inflation has knocked out all the gains.
Much of it isn’t that young people don’t want to do what previous generations did, they simply can’t afford it. Nearly everything really is much more expensive than it was in the recent past. College education, housing, health care, food, cars and many things have become much more costly. Many would be quite surprised that all three branches of state higher education in California charged nearly nothing to students up to the late 1970’s. Right here not so long ago in these United States we had nearly free college, shocking, right! Most don’t remember that after taking office as governor of California in 1967 Ronald Regan started the process of eliminating low or no cost higher education. Regan is one of the single most influential figures to have affected many national trends and policies we have had over the last 50+ years that continue to have a big impact on our lives. The chipping away of public financing for college started then. Reagan was the founding father of many of the destructive trends in the current state of America. He started the emptying of psychiatric hospitals. In some ways that may have had good intentions but putting people out of the hospitals with nothing to fill that gap created multiple worse problems. Many of the mentally ill left the hospitals for the streets or the prisons. All of these trends encompass the chipping away of public support for the average person to increasingly put the responsibility on the individual for everything. Retirement, public education, health care are all increasingly funded by each person paying for more and more themselves. The average employed person paid $2470 for their health insurance in the year 2000 which has increased to over $8000 for one person in 2023.
For Americans who fear public health care I would say who wants to pay full price retail, get it wholesale! It’s like do you go to CVS or a local boutique for things or would you get a better deal buying direct from the manufacturer. That in many ways is how we in America get our services. We pay taxes to the government. Then the government gives money to middle men like health insurance companies, for profit universities and so on. Those corporations extract as much profit for themselves as possible passing the costs on to us. Why not cut out the intermediate players and buy direct! Switching to a more public model wouldn’t be such scary scary socialism, why not just call it shopping smart. The average college graduation includes a parting gift of student debt of nearly $39,000. Is it any wonder that for the first time since the depression more than half, 52% of those pesky “spoiled” kids under 30 are still living with Mom and Dad. It was interesting to see the documentarian Michael Moore interviewing people from higher income European countries saying they don’t really worry too much about higher education, health care or retirement with their way of doing things. Putting off buying a house, having a kid or even having a wedding isn’t simply a matter of cutting back on the lattes and avocado toasts, we need major systemic change soon.
Ben Bregman | May 2024