Posted on 04/29/2017 5:47:43 AM PDT by Wolfie
Maybe The Snowflakes Are Right?
What if "Pajama Boy" is right?
GDP came in pretty punky this morning, and a big part of it was consumption -- consumer spending.
Much has been said, including by myself, about millennials and other young people on both sides of the millennial generation being less ambitious, living at home even well into their 20s, working part time or not at all.
What if their decision is a purely logical one?
What if those folks have decided that they're not into "rocket science" (e.g. high-grade math, computer programming, etc) and are not going to go to some college to blow $50,000 or more they don't have because older adults have jacked up the cost by 500%?
What if they see you trying to **** them up the ass, in short, and are simply refusing to play?
What if they've decided that they may as well get stoned, drunk, or just cruise on through life and accept less because they know you rigged things against them, you intend to and are trying to screw them and they see through it?
In short, what if their decision is actually logical and it's your fault because you have sat on your ass while the medical and educational systems have turned into financial rape-rooms, you allowed the FASFA to come into play, you allowed colleges and the government to define anyone unmarried under 24 as "not" independent and demanded parental income and asset reports for someone who's an actual adult?
In short what if they saw you treat them like children in colleges, in government and in everyday life, they can do the math and realize you voted to spend the money more than once and thus your pensions are all broke, you sat on your ass while health care went from 3% of the economy to 19.x% doing nothing to stop it and you also colluded with their High School teachers and counselors to remove any sort of encouragement or curricular support for anything but a university at $20,000+ a year even if where said student's interest lies simply isn't in a field that makes $100k+ a year for decades, if ever, and said in response:
"Ok, you want to financially******me that way? **** you."
What if I'm right, even a little?
What if I'm right a lot?
What are you going to do about it? You can't force people to work, you know. You can't force them to strive. You can't force them to innovate.
It appears that those who are a bit older have a choice to make: We either put a stop the financial rape-room games in our economy aimed at young people -- right damn now -- or the rot that is building will ultimately destroy us when the government funding assumptions collapse.
Still think you can sit and swill beer over the weekend eh?
Better think again.
There is little doubt that the snowflakes are making a rational economic decision when it comes to moving in with mom and dad.
Some of the reasons in the article may well be part of it.
The main reasons are more than likely that “they don’t have any other good choices”.
Lots of college debt. Few job prospects. Can’t pay the rent, much less pay anything back.
Sure, some could simply choose to work harder and claw their way out of debt and despair. Most people aren’t that smart or motivated.
So the way to preserve the most comfortable lifestyle at the least cost and effort and disruption to (their) lives is to move in with mom and dad.
Whatever else you want to call it, it certainly is, from their perspective, the most rational economic choice.
What is so hard to figure out about that?
I kind of like this guy’s perspective. It certainly is food for thought!
There’s got to be a way to lower the percentage of the economy that goes to medical costs. I don’t think we’re up to it. Financial rape rooms? That’s pretty good.
If my kids want to stay at home they damn well better be helping around the house, at a minimum.
great article.
deal with it hippie democrats
Sounds to me like they’ve appropriated some other culture.
After playing the toil until you drop game while chasing things, I almost did die. That made me realize there are more important things in life, so maybe the snowflakes are on to something. Then again crushing debt, globalized depressed wages, and technology making careers disappear might have something to do with snowflake attitudes also.
No, but we can sit back and watch them starve to death.
Well, at least this guy did us the favor of using a lot of asterisks to cover up his gutter language. Is it a mark of “coolness” among some of these writers to swear in public discourse?
To his point, I believe the very large increases in medical services and college costs, compared to most other products and services, is directly related to government involvement in both fields, resulting in a huge increase in demand.
What would the writer have us do, other than try to vote socialists out of office? Has he kept them out? Are the millenials who he says are disillusioned over their prospects working to keep socialists out of office?
Good thing for the asterisk symbol. This guy is a total potty mouth!
Trump’s tax cuts are not in place.
Obamacare is not replaced.
He might be president, but these are not his policies.
Not going hungry are they?
Well my kid is. He is thin as a bone, 28, struggling. Got to hand it to him, he did buy himself a crappy little starter house so he is not getting ripped off paying rent. He drives a horrible little car. No breaks.
Those that were predicting that the U.S economy would be flying high by now have been proven wrong. U.S. GDP grew at the worst rate in three years during the first quarter of 2017, and many are wondering if this is the beginning of a major economic slowdown Of course when we are dealing with the official numbers that the federal government puts out, it is important to acknowledge that they are highly manipulated. There are many that have correctly pointed out to me that if the numbers were not being doctored that they would show that we are still in a recession. In fact, John Williams of shadowstats.com has shown that if honest numbers were being used that U.S. GDP growth would have been consistently negative going all the way back to 2005. So I definitely don’t have any argument with those that claim that we are actually in a recession right now. But even if we take the official numbers that the federal government puts out at face value, they are definitely very ugly…
Economic growth slowed in the first quarter to its slowest pace in three years as sluggish consumer spending and business stockpiling offset solid business investment. Many economists write off the weak performance as a byproduct of temporary blips and expect healthy growth in 2017.
The nation’s gross domestic product — the value of all goods and services produced in the USA — increased at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 0.7%, the Commerce Department said Friday, below the tepid 2.1% pace clocked both in the fourth quarter and as an average throughout the nearly 8-year-old recovery.
Economists expected a 1% increase in output, according to a Bloomberg survey.
Even if you want to assume that it is a legitimate number, 0.7 percent economic growth is essentially stall speed, and this follows a year when the U.S. economy grew at a rate of just 1.6 percent.
So why is this happening?
Of course the “experts” in the mainstream media are blaming all sorts of temporary factors…
Economists blamed the weather. It was too warm this time around, rather than too cold, which is the usual explanation for Q1 debacles.
And they blamed the IRS refund checks that had been delayed due to last year’s spectacular identity theft problem. Everyone blamed everything on these delayed refund checks, including the auto industry and the restaurant industry. But by mid-February, a veritable tsunami of checks went out, and by the end of February, the IRS was pretty much caught up. So March should have been awash in consumer spending. But no. So we’ll patiently wait for that miracle to happen in second quarter.
They always want us to think that “boom times” for the U.S. economy are right around the corner, but those “boom times” have never materialized since the end of the last financial crisis.
Instead, we have had year after year of economic malaise and stagnation, and it looks like 2017 is going to continue that trend. The following are 11 reasons why U.S. economic growth is the worst that it has been in 3 years…
#1 The weak economic growth in the first quarter was the continuation of a long-term trend. Barack Obama was the only president in history not to have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent, and this is now the fourth time in the last six quarters when economic growth has been less than 2 percent on an annualized basis. So essentially this latest number signals that our long-term economic decline is continuing.
#2 Consumer spending drives the U.S. economy more than anything else, and at this point most U.S. consumers are tapped out. In fact, CBS News has reported that three-fourths of all U.S. consumers have to “scramble to cover their living costs” each month.
#3 The job market appears to be slowing. The U.S. economy only added about 98,000 jobs in March, and that was approximately half of what most analysts were expecting.
#4 The flow of credit appears to be slowing as well. In fact, this is the first time since the last recession when there has been no growth for commercial and industrial lending for at least six months.
#5 Last month, U.S. factory output dropped at the fastest pace that we have witnessed in more than two years.
#6 We are in the midst of the worst “retail apocalypse” in U.S. history. The number of retailers that has filed for bankruptcy has already surpassed the total for the entire year of 2016, and at the current rate we will smash the previous all-time record for store closings in a year by nearly 2,000.
#7 The auto industry is also experiencing a great deal of stress. This has been the worst year for U.S. automakers since the last recession, and seven out of the eight largest fell short of their sales projections in March.
#8 Used vehicle prices are falling “dramatically”, and Morgan Stanley is now projecting that used vehicle prices “could crash by up to 50%” over the next several years.
#9 Commercial bankruptcies are rising at the fastest pace since the last recession.
#10 Consumer bankruptcies are rising at the fastest pace since the last recession.
#11 The student loan bubble is starting to burst. It is being reported that 27 percent of all student loans are already in default, and some analysts expect that number to go much higher.
And of course some areas of the country are being harder hit than others The following comes from CNBC…
Four states have not yet fully recovered from the Great Recession. As of the third quarter of last year, the latest data available, the economies of Louisiana, Wyoming, Connecticut and Alaska were still smaller than when the recession ended in June 2009.
Other states that have recovered have seen their economic recoveries stall out. Those include Minnesota, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota and West Virginia.
We should be thankful that we are not experiencing a full-blown economic meltdown just yet, but it is undeniable that our long-term economic decline continues to roll along.
And without a doubt the storm clouds are building on the horizon, and many believe that the next major economic downturn will begin in the not too distant future.
There is real food for thought in this.
Living in this era is expensive. If you have a need to be hospitalized, you are not told the costs upfront. You issue a blank check and hope for the best. We don’t buy other products this way…..say a car.
One illness can take everything you have saved away, and put you in debt.
It wasn’t always like that and I don’t understand why it is now. I had my children back in the 1970’s without insurance. We paid for the doctor and hospital directly. We were young, and didn’t have much then…..yet we were able to pay our medical bills without great difficulty. (I wasn’t working either. One salary! )
We paid the doctor for office visits for ourselves and our kids as they grew up. It wasn’t unaffordable.
Why is it so different now? What changed?
We have come, for some reason, to accept the astronomical costs for everything.
the preceding was from an Economic Collapse blog...
Anyone stupid enough to swallow this bilge knows naught about the struggles of previous generations. Kids today have a wide lazy streak and expect more than ever to live the easy life. This is why we have the popular expression; “jobs that Americans won’t do.”
The short answer is, if you don’t like the costs of goods and services, don’t buy them. It’s called a choice.
Ending H-1B will alleviate a lot of the problem. The problem is unmitigated globalism and immigration which dilutes every Americans earning potential.
Ridiculously insane article. It could have made some good points if it had avoided descending into “Two and a Half Men” land.
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