Young Americans are barely keeping their head above water, with nearly half living paycheck to paycheck and just one in six Americans under age 30 saying they’re financially secure.
They are mostly all victims in one sense or another… But never assume everyone has the capacity to be productive enough to even get a well paying job…
Sad but true that approximately 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. This means that over half of the adult population in the United States has difficulty with tasks that require reading comprehension beyond a basic level.
To put this into perspective:
* Functional illiteracy: Around 21% of U.S. adults are considered functionally illiterate, meaning they struggle with reading and writing skills necessary for everyday tasks. This translates to roughly 43 million adults. Some sources even state that 45 million adults read below a 5th-grade level.
* Below basic literacy: Approximately 28% of adults in the U.S. have literacy skills at or below Level 1, indicating difficulty with tasks such as comparing information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences from text.
These statistics highlight a significant challenge in the United States, impacting individuals' employment opportunities, income levels, and overall ability to navigate daily life.
If you don't have the tools, you can't build what you need to survive.
Raise wages = raise prices. Those costs will be passed on workers. Full stop. Raising low skilled labor wages is not the answer.
You almost got there. Education and mentoring is the answer. We have to get kids engaged and keep them engaged. Entrepreneurial drive to start businesses of their own, make things, develop client relationships, etc. That’s how they will start rising. And feeling better about themselves.
Oh but wait, let’s only fund religious schools so we can all be more moral and (self)righteous. Good luck with that. God not going to help you start a business.
I was fortunate to have a much older friend and mentor who encouraged me when starting my own business. He was a former employer who had fired me. That was over 40 years ago and I sure miss him.
You're somewhat wrong on religion. There is an established literature on the behaviour of religious people and communities. For example, religious people give roughly 7% of their income and time to charitable causes, compared to 1.5% for secular groups. This may represent a higher degree of altruism, but there are also very significant social incentives in terms of status gains within religious communities. Humans are highly prosocial animals. It's why social media has been so harmful for us- there are genuine ingroup pay-offs for tribalism, with few negative consequences if one is careful and not prone to rage-posting.
Entrepreneurs are more likely than non-entrepreneurs to attend religious services regularly. A 2012 study by Neubert, Bradley, et al., published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, found that religious values correlate with entrepreneurial orientation, especially when those values promote hard work, stewardship, and self-reliance. There is also the dense social capital associated with religious communities. Churches often function like business incubators for small entrepreneurs- providing early clients, advice, word-of-mouth promotion, and even informal labour networks. Religious institutions may provide financial support, mentorship, or access to community development funds.
One of the things which really pisses me off about the equity crowd, is that most people are broadly supportive of social mobility and identifying/promoting talent in poorer communities. This type of approach isn't racially divisive, yet it can level the playing field- because, guess what- per population, there are more poor Black people! The other issue is that the social coding of religious communities can help defeat the pretty stark data from Becker Outcome Tests.
The whole Coding for Bias argument focuses on a hill with a huge mountain behind it. Even if one were effectively blind the systems to race which predict risk for the purposes of lending and insurance, ethnicity would still be stamped in the small data, because of ingroup self-segregation. An individual could have absolutely no bad indicators in their risk profile, but because of their zip code and a few other indicators (like purchasing the wrong type of sneakers online) systems would generate predictive risk indicators. Even something as banal as shopping at Target may be a negative indicator. We are supposed to be a society which values individual merit, yet insurance and risk systems are effectively collectivist in nature and can amount to collective punishment. You may never have taken a payday loan in your life, but because people in your community have, you will be subject to collectively punished.
And religious communities are a good way of reversing this prevailing weight of gravity. Any non-governmental civic institution is. It's just that churches and other religious institutions tend to be more common and more powerful as a locus of dense social capital. There are plenty of small government interventions which can work or help at little to no cost. One method is to offer space, small capital, or vending licenses to churches or local organizations that can run their own micro-incubators. Another is Entrepreneurship Prizes or Nudge Grants. Local government can offer $500–$5,000 no-strings “status grants” for small business ideas, awarded via public pitch events in community settings, not bureaucratic forms. The money doesn't matter- it's a form of almost free advertising which will boost word-of-mouth and possibly make the local news. Critically, these "nudge" grants are perceived as honour badges more than aid- recognition of socially laudable behaviour and great personal character.
Look if you take the cynical view on religions, that's fine. I disagree, but I don't go around advertising the fact that I'm a Christian any more than lecturing people about the the benefits of pescetarianism. I find people who try to impose their views on others insufferable, which is probably why I took at instant dislike to woke. But just as we should want people, regardless of race or background to achieve their full potential, it's important to recognise the potential of churches or any other form of civic institution as embedded leveraging tools which can be used to generate social mobility and create economic value, Apart from anything else they are existing resources which can be utilised for virtually free.
I'm not arguing that the targeting should be exclusive to religious institutions, but when it comes to civic organisations within poorer communities there are often scant resources on the ground, and using government to build invites the wrong incentives structure. There is always the tendency to think of government as an infinite money tree to be shaken at every opportunity. The aim should be thriving self-sufficiency not dependence, and if anything the NGO apparatus is even worse, because it has zero positive accountability.
Extrapolate that out four years and we're looking at 1,120,000 deportations.
Dementia Joe let in 20 million illegals during his four years alone, which doesn't count the tens of millions of illegals (50 million?) that needed to be deported prior to Dementia Joe.
Trump's efforts, to the extent there are any, are like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. He's not going to be doing anything of note on this issue.
They have received $30 Trillion from DC since 2008
Time for a 4% tax on GROSS Wall Street trades or moving $$$ offshore. Holding stocks/ bond for pico-second or offshoring profits isn't investing.
Make it about investing!
No bonuses till $7 trillion FED debt repaid!
Taxpayers/FED rescued Wall Street in 1987, 2000, 2007....Wall Street bank/firms have very low cost of capital which they can DESTROY the people in America and BUY WASHINGTON DC!
We need to FORCE THEM TO INVEST...not spin money or buy people's houses!
HFT is the most useless activity in history! in NJ the RICHEST man is a HFT trader...basically front running the market using math/physics. For what point?
This seems to be a global phenomenon, and might help explain why there’s been a huge growth in 18-27 year olds (some go as high as 34) voting not just conservative, for but changes. Republicans and conservatives (in Canada and Europe) are voting for populist parties in increasing numbers, most against the existing elitist and out-of-touch regimes. Boomers, on the other hands, seem happy with the bloated, ineffectual, and scerlotic status quo (not this one).
Stagnant wages plus extreme, outrageous, student-loan indebtedness with promises of bright futures for often impractical degrees results in youth impoverishment and perpetual enslavement to highly protected and cruel "educational" debt.
Oye, as a Gen Y millennial, I can say that these figures match what I see amongst my cohort.
Here's how I see the tradeoffs for millennials – they are stuck with the following tradeoffs. The increasingly mutually exclusive choices are: pursue a career, start a new family, maintain existing family, self-actualize oneself, own a home, continue friendships...
- Gen X can pick three, but must neglect the rest.
- Gen Y can pick two, but must neglect the rest.
- Gen Z can pick one, but must neglect the rest.
Gen X seemed to have just barely gained traction in the 2010s before covid—constituting an "event horizon" of no return for most young people which is to say: whatever social capital and financial capital we held passing over that horizon is what millennials had for the next five years (up until now, at least – we'll see if things change).
Gen Y however has had to beg/borrow/steal to fully "adult" in any capacity – the only kids I know in this generation who own a home were effectively given one, paid in cash, from a rich (Boomer) relative. I know very few Gen Y millennials who have kids. I just barely managed to pay off all my regrettable school loans working in manufacturing and tech jobs, but most of my peers have given up on trying to pay off their student loans (often over $100K each) and thus froth angrily about how we need socialism and "forgiveness" which of course is actually theft.
Gen Z is completely unmoored from my perspective – stranded across the board. I only know one or two who are married, but none of them have kids or homes. Most leaned heavily into the "self-actualize" or "career" categories, but both of those pursuits have become eclipsed by their exceptional addiction to social media (this generation was born into social media) and has effectively ruined them.
I was never financially secure when I was younger. I was always "pay check to pay check". I had kids, a mortgage, car payments. I'm barely financially secure now at 58.
Nothing too much new as each generation has had their "financial" difficulties. What exactly is financial security? What determines it? Surrendering your life to a set of numbers plucked out of thin air by some pretend financial guru or government drone?
Very few individuals are going to have financial security before age 30 or even age 40. Maybe a couple might get closer but not so much if kids enter the picture. I would think any security comes from making yourself employable as you move through life. Your greatest financial security will come from staying healthy.
More than ever, we live in an over-marketed society and economy where spending well beyond your means is the key to happiness and prosperity. That is what is marketed. The truth is that we are spending so that the vast majority can provide some measure of security to the thinner minority. It's Pareto's 80-20 equation in full force...perhaps being crunched down to a 90-10 ratio.
End. The. Fed.
They are mostly all victims in one sense or another… But never assume everyone has the capacity to be productive enough to even get a well paying job…
Sad but true that approximately 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. This means that over half of the adult population in the United States has difficulty with tasks that require reading comprehension beyond a basic level.
To put this into perspective:
* Functional illiteracy: Around 21% of U.S. adults are considered functionally illiterate, meaning they struggle with reading and writing skills necessary for everyday tasks. This translates to roughly 43 million adults. Some sources even state that 45 million adults read below a 5th-grade level.
* Below basic literacy: Approximately 28% of adults in the U.S. have literacy skills at or below Level 1, indicating difficulty with tasks such as comparing information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences from text.
These statistics highlight a significant challenge in the United States, impacting individuals' employment opportunities, income levels, and overall ability to navigate daily life.
If you don't have the tools, you can't build what you need to survive.
Raise wages = raise prices. Those costs will be passed on workers. Full stop. Raising low skilled labor wages is not the answer.
You almost got there. Education and mentoring is the answer. We have to get kids engaged and keep them engaged. Entrepreneurial drive to start businesses of their own, make things, develop client relationships, etc. That’s how they will start rising. And feeling better about themselves.
Oh but wait, let’s only fund religious schools so we can all be more moral and (self)righteous. Good luck with that. God not going to help you start a business.
I was fortunate to have a much older friend and mentor who encouraged me when starting my own business. He was a former employer who had fired me. That was over 40 years ago and I sure miss him.
Much more motivating and lucrative for you than handing you a migrant’s low skilled job yeah?
You're somewhat wrong on religion. There is an established literature on the behaviour of religious people and communities. For example, religious people give roughly 7% of their income and time to charitable causes, compared to 1.5% for secular groups. This may represent a higher degree of altruism, but there are also very significant social incentives in terms of status gains within religious communities. Humans are highly prosocial animals. It's why social media has been so harmful for us- there are genuine ingroup pay-offs for tribalism, with few negative consequences if one is careful and not prone to rage-posting.
Entrepreneurs are more likely than non-entrepreneurs to attend religious services regularly. A 2012 study by Neubert, Bradley, et al., published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, found that religious values correlate with entrepreneurial orientation, especially when those values promote hard work, stewardship, and self-reliance. There is also the dense social capital associated with religious communities. Churches often function like business incubators for small entrepreneurs- providing early clients, advice, word-of-mouth promotion, and even informal labour networks. Religious institutions may provide financial support, mentorship, or access to community development funds.
One of the things which really pisses me off about the equity crowd, is that most people are broadly supportive of social mobility and identifying/promoting talent in poorer communities. This type of approach isn't racially divisive, yet it can level the playing field- because, guess what- per population, there are more poor Black people! The other issue is that the social coding of religious communities can help defeat the pretty stark data from Becker Outcome Tests.
The whole Coding for Bias argument focuses on a hill with a huge mountain behind it. Even if one were effectively blind the systems to race which predict risk for the purposes of lending and insurance, ethnicity would still be stamped in the small data, because of ingroup self-segregation. An individual could have absolutely no bad indicators in their risk profile, but because of their zip code and a few other indicators (like purchasing the wrong type of sneakers online) systems would generate predictive risk indicators. Even something as banal as shopping at Target may be a negative indicator. We are supposed to be a society which values individual merit, yet insurance and risk systems are effectively collectivist in nature and can amount to collective punishment. You may never have taken a payday loan in your life, but because people in your community have, you will be subject to collectively punished.
And religious communities are a good way of reversing this prevailing weight of gravity. Any non-governmental civic institution is. It's just that churches and other religious institutions tend to be more common and more powerful as a locus of dense social capital. There are plenty of small government interventions which can work or help at little to no cost. One method is to offer space, small capital, or vending licenses to churches or local organizations that can run their own micro-incubators. Another is Entrepreneurship Prizes or Nudge Grants. Local government can offer $500–$5,000 no-strings “status grants” for small business ideas, awarded via public pitch events in community settings, not bureaucratic forms. The money doesn't matter- it's a form of almost free advertising which will boost word-of-mouth and possibly make the local news. Critically, these "nudge" grants are perceived as honour badges more than aid- recognition of socially laudable behaviour and great personal character.
Look if you take the cynical view on religions, that's fine. I disagree, but I don't go around advertising the fact that I'm a Christian any more than lecturing people about the the benefits of pescetarianism. I find people who try to impose their views on others insufferable, which is probably why I took at instant dislike to woke. But just as we should want people, regardless of race or background to achieve their full potential, it's important to recognise the potential of churches or any other form of civic institution as embedded leveraging tools which can be used to generate social mobility and create economic value, Apart from anything else they are existing resources which can be utilised for virtually free.
I'm not arguing that the targeting should be exclusive to religious institutions, but when it comes to civic organisations within poorer communities there are often scant resources on the ground, and using government to build invites the wrong incentives structure. There is always the tendency to think of government as an infinite money tree to be shaken at every opportunity. The aim should be thriving self-sufficiency not dependence, and if anything the NGO apparatus is even worse, because it has zero positive accountability.
Only 70,000 have been deported in Trump's first 100 days: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/white-house-touts-nearly-140000-deportations-but-data-says-roughly-half-actually-deported/ar-AA1DNraR?ocid=BingNewsVerp
Extrapolate that out four years and we're looking at 1,120,000 deportations.
Dementia Joe let in 20 million illegals during his four years alone, which doesn't count the tens of millions of illegals (50 million?) that needed to be deported prior to Dementia Joe.
Trump's efforts, to the extent there are any, are like putting a band aid on a bullet wound. He's not going to be doing anything of note on this issue.
Reform Wall Street...
They have received $30 Trillion from DC since 2008
Time for a 4% tax on GROSS Wall Street trades or moving $$$ offshore. Holding stocks/ bond for pico-second or offshoring profits isn't investing.
Make it about investing!
No bonuses till $7 trillion FED debt repaid!
Taxpayers/FED rescued Wall Street in 1987, 2000, 2007....Wall Street bank/firms have very low cost of capital which they can DESTROY the people in America and BUY WASHINGTON DC!
We need to FORCE THEM TO INVEST...not spin money or buy people's houses!
HFT is the most useless activity in history! in NJ the RICHEST man is a HFT trader...basically front running the market using math/physics. For what point?
This seems to be a global phenomenon, and might help explain why there’s been a huge growth in 18-27 year olds (some go as high as 34) voting not just conservative, for but changes. Republicans and conservatives (in Canada and Europe) are voting for populist parties in increasing numbers, most against the existing elitist and out-of-touch regimes. Boomers, on the other hands, seem happy with the bloated, ineffectual, and scerlotic status quo (not this one).
Stagnant wages plus extreme, outrageous, student-loan indebtedness with promises of bright futures for often impractical degrees results in youth impoverishment and perpetual enslavement to highly protected and cruel "educational" debt.
Oye, as a Gen Y millennial, I can say that these figures match what I see amongst my cohort.
Here's how I see the tradeoffs for millennials – they are stuck with the following tradeoffs. The increasingly mutually exclusive choices are: pursue a career, start a new family, maintain existing family, self-actualize oneself, own a home, continue friendships...
- Gen X can pick three, but must neglect the rest.
- Gen Y can pick two, but must neglect the rest.
- Gen Z can pick one, but must neglect the rest.
Gen X seemed to have just barely gained traction in the 2010s before covid—constituting an "event horizon" of no return for most young people which is to say: whatever social capital and financial capital we held passing over that horizon is what millennials had for the next five years (up until now, at least – we'll see if things change).
Gen Y however has had to beg/borrow/steal to fully "adult" in any capacity – the only kids I know in this generation who own a home were effectively given one, paid in cash, from a rich (Boomer) relative. I know very few Gen Y millennials who have kids. I just barely managed to pay off all my regrettable school loans working in manufacturing and tech jobs, but most of my peers have given up on trying to pay off their student loans (often over $100K each) and thus froth angrily about how we need socialism and "forgiveness" which of course is actually theft.
Gen Z is completely unmoored from my perspective – stranded across the board. I only know one or two who are married, but none of them have kids or homes. Most leaned heavily into the "self-actualize" or "career" categories, but both of those pursuits have become eclipsed by their exceptional addiction to social media (this generation was born into social media) and has effectively ruined them.
Your last sentence tells a sad, sad story. So many want their career to be inside a smart phone.
I was never financially secure when I was younger. I was always "pay check to pay check". I had kids, a mortgage, car payments. I'm barely financially secure now at 58.
Nothing too much new as each generation has had their "financial" difficulties. What exactly is financial security? What determines it? Surrendering your life to a set of numbers plucked out of thin air by some pretend financial guru or government drone?
Very few individuals are going to have financial security before age 30 or even age 40. Maybe a couple might get closer but not so much if kids enter the picture. I would think any security comes from making yourself employable as you move through life. Your greatest financial security will come from staying healthy.
More than ever, we live in an over-marketed society and economy where spending well beyond your means is the key to happiness and prosperity. That is what is marketed. The truth is that we are spending so that the vast majority can provide some measure of security to the thinner minority. It's Pareto's 80-20 equation in full force...perhaps being crunched down to a 90-10 ratio.