The New American Household by Brooks Agnew

The New American Household

In America today, more than 60 million people live in multi-generational households.  That number is so large that it may seem difficult to believe, but the truth is that vast numbers of young adults have had to move back in with their parents and grandparents in recent years due to the deteriorating economy.  I am not talking about small children, here.  I am talking about 20-40 somethings who have been out on their own for a number of years, become victims of Federal tyranny, and have retreated to their parent’s homes to rebuild their lives.  Most of them would rather have their own lives.  They would prefer that their business didn’t go broke or that their employer would not have been forced out of business by Federal regulations.  Most of them fully intend to get back out and try it again, once they honor their creditors and pay off their debts. 

But here’s the problem.  Millions of our young people cannot find decent jobs once they leave school, and millions of them are absolutely overwhelmed by debt.  But, what is the root cause of that problem?  Some might argue that these young people are lazy, but that is rare. Most of them are using their parent’s pad as a safety net.  Why do they need it?  Some call it bad judgment with a credit card.  Some call it, college debt.  Some call it the high cost of living with a vastly depressed wage base. 

 According to the Pew Research Center, 12 percent of the U.S. population was living in multi-generational households back in 1980.  Today, that number is up to 19 percent.  That means nearly one out of every five U.S. adults now live with their parents or their grandparents.

People can argue that kids today won’t drive an older car with high miles because that’s all they can afford.  I’ll cover that in a minute.  One of the big culprits the left would have you believe, of course, is student loan debt.  According to CNN, approximately 70 percent of all college graduates will have student loan debt to pay off once they leave school, and the average loan balance for those graduates is about $28,950. That is typical and not too bad to pay off.  I had spent about $48,000, and I paid every dime of it back with interest with my earnings while I raised 4 kids.  Did I have a new car?  No.  Did I buy a big house?  Nope.  That’s the way it is if you intend to pay back your student loans.  You got the knowledge, now go apply it.

But there are many that run up $100,000 in debt at high end schools for degrees that prepare you to be a community barnacle.  When I was an engineering manager, I had a boss who had a degree in Middle Eastern Studies.  Really?  Yes, really.  Talk about worthless.  Yes, he was.  I encourage young people to apply to the “best schools” that they possibly can, and I recommend that they should focus on fields of study that will earn a good living by being productive to society.  I assure them that they will be able to easily pay back any debts once they leave college because of the “good jobs” that they will get upon graduation.  Of course it means they cannot take on any other debts until that loan is paid back.  Do they listen?  Hell no.

Now, that does not change the fact that millions upon millions of our young people have discovered that the good jobs that they were promised simply do not exist.  Oh, they don’t exist for 30 year olds, either.  Or 40 years olds.  And after 50, they get even more rare.  In fact, if you are a degreed professional in America over the age of 59, you are facing almost certain unemployment for the rest of your life if things continue the way Obama had set them up.  Dodd-Frank makes it illegal for banks to loan money to startups, which ensures there will never be any jobs for anyone, unless they are government jobs.  The current unemployment rate for experienced degreed engineers in North Carolina over the age of 55 is close to 35%.  After 60, it is closer to 65% unemployment.  The old saying that if you cannot get a job, you make a job has been rendered meaningless, because Obama has hunted down and solicited every investor in America so hard that they are now hiding outside the country.

After nearly 20 years of earnestly paying off credit card debt, Americans’ use of credit cards has recently been creeping up again: Household debt in the United States increased by $35 billion, to $12.29 trillion, during the second quarter of 2016, a 0.3 percent rise from the previous quarter that was driven by credit cards and auto loans, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  By the way, that is money that earns the banks 30% interest on a balance that is set up to remain constant for at least 50 years, if you make the minimum payments.  And those car loans?  Take a good look at the next mortgage bubble about to burst.  Millions of car loans are in danger of complete default, except there is nothing of any value to back those loans.  Less than 5% of cars are worth the lien against the title.

We often criticize the federal government for being 19.4 trillion dollars in debt, and rightly so, but let us not forget that U.S. households are 12.2 trillion dollars in debt.  And for what?  Nothing.  Nothing at all to show for the debt.  Restaurants, movies, alcohol, clothes, and groceries.  We are a society that feels entitled to everything, and we are not afraid to go into debt to get it.  And unfortunately we have passed on this “entitlement mentality” to the next generation.  We want frequent flier miles, hotel points, 1% cash back, and we want it now.

Listen people; you are in charge. Most of you will pay for your own higher education. And if you don’t get it, you are most certainly relegated to working on a factory line, if you can be lucky enough to get the job. 

You parents are overprotective and prevent your children from playing outside and making mistakes you had a chance to make to gain that thick skin. You don’t let your 12-year-old kid stay at home alone because they are too young. And who is wrong when your child has a conflict at school? I bet you always blame the other side, not your “special snowflake”.  And you are  surprised when the whole generation is offended by facing the truth?  You are just another plastic player trying to look good.  It must hurt, right?

This generation of young adults is the most “educated” in our history, and yet they also appear to be one of the least competent. 

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). 67% of college students in other countries scored better that America in math.  That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for math among the study’s 22 developed countries.

In the old days, our institutions of higher learning had exceedingly high standards and they demanded the best from students.  Today, our system of higher education is a joke compared to campus life 20 years ago.

At Brown University – like Harvard, one of the eight elite Ivy League universities – the New York Times reported students set up a “safe space” that offered calming music, cookies, Play-Doh and a video of frolicking puppies” to help students cope with a discussion on how colleges should handle sexual assault.  Boo freakin hoo.

A Harvard student described in the university newspaper attending a “safe space” complete with “massage circles” that was designed to help students have open conversations.  But not too real of conversations.  Nothing that might actually hurt their feelings.  We have raised a generation of overly-coddled, self-absorbed girlie boys and girlie girls that have never learned how to become men and women.  And since our education system is completely and totally dominated by progressives, our young people have had decades of liberal propaganda pumped into their skulls, and the results are absolutely frightening.

For example, one survey discovered that 62 percent of Millennials say that they are “liberal”, and 42 percent of them say that they are “socialists”.  Like there’s a difference.  That’s like saying half of Mormons are Latter Day Saints.

A different survey discovered that more than half of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 say that they reject capitalism.  Why is that?  Because they are broke and want someone to please give them a living wage, so they can go off and get high and live.  The rich have the money, so they should give us some.  It’s not fair that they have money to buy a new smart phone and we don’t.  We are forced to live with a phone that won’t text more than 500 times a month.  I mean come on.  That is just not fair.

If the coming election were to be determined by the Millennials, Hillary Clinton would win by one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history.  The scary thing is that if Hillary had not bought off the super-delegates with years of small manila envelopes of cash, Bernie would have won the primary by 22%.  I don’t know about you, but when the majority of the country thinks that private property should be banned, health care should be free to everyone, and kids should be able to stay in school for their whole lives with free housing and free food and free, green tech mass transportation for everyone is very very frightening.  We would all starve and then choke on our own human waste if no one worked.