Thank You Sir! May I Have Another?
In the indispensable baby boomer comedy, Animal House, there is a scene depicting a fraternity hazing ritual where Chip Diller (played by Kevin Bacon) is being spanked by a senior fraternity brother dressed in a robe that would make Star Wars’s Emperor Palpatine proud. After each smack, Diller exclaims: “Thank you sir! May I have another?” That was in a movie, but in real life the millennial generation (birthdates in the early 80s through the early 2000s) seems to be saying pretty much the same thing.
It has been firmly established that, as a group, millennials are in worse shape financially than any similar cohort at a equivalent point in their lives than any other in American history. (Source: “Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis”, by Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg, The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2019). They have been, you might say, royally… abused.
Much of this reprehensible situation can be blamed, I’m afraid, on my generation, the baby boomers. We were (and are) extravagant spendthrifts. We played fast and loose with our savings (when and if we HAD savings) as well as with the national debt. And, we accumulated unprecedented amounts of it (national debt, that is). And, what’s worse, we also let our children accumulate massive amounts debt, mostly in the form of student loans, as well. We enacted enormous benefit programs that allowed – no – encouraged laziness, sloth and dependency, not to mention staggering numbers of out of wedlock children to be raised in single parent households and supported only by federal largess. We were, in a word, irresponsible. And we have passed the fruits of that irresponsibility on to our progeny. For that, we are culpable.
The surprising thing, however, is, unwittingly or no, millennials have aided and abetted this abuse themselves.
As a group, millennials reached financial independence in the late 2000s amid a financial contraction (this, of course, is not their fault). As a consequence, they found that little economic opportunity awaited them. Graduates with bachelor’s degrees, and even more advanced degrees, found themselves unable to procure quality jobs, and sometimes, jobs of ANY sort. I have met many millennial graduates, some from the Ivy League, who were forced to take low level jobs in retail or business, or, alternatively, continue with endless education, chasing never ending degrees (taking out larger and larger loans), leading, ultimately, to financial dead ends. But, instead of supporting and voting for Republican legislators that would have been pro business and would have favored low taxes, they voted, en masse, for Democratic legislators who promptly did the opposite. (The WORST thing you can do to a struggling economy is to increase taxes on it). They then helped elect and re-elect a certain Barack Obama, an individual who never really worked a day in his life. (What, in God’s name, does a “community organizer” DO for a living?… Hard to say, isn’t it?… I’d wager, however, that he never punched a time clock, if you know what I mean). And, not only had the man failed to hold down any normal type of job, he had voiced, many times, what amounted to sympathy for the socialist agenda, programs that are generally death on prosperity. Following the recession of 2008, the redoubtable engine that is the American economy was poised for a swift rebound. In fact, historically, the American economy TYPICALLY follows recessions with years of robust growth. With proper management, within a year or two, America could have erased all of the losses of 2008 and been on its way to lofty heights. Instead, Obama and his liberal sycophants in Congress raised taxes and proceeded to enact Presidential edicts and legislative hurtles that strangled the struggling economy further, resulting in GDP growth rates under 2.1% annually (Source: Bloomberg.com, Aug 1, 2018) with some fiscal quarters averaging “growth” rates of MINUS 1% (1st quarter 2011 and 1st quarter 2014). Under such mismanagement, unemployment ballooned to 8.1%, versus, for example, 3.7% currently under President Trump (Source: Philip Klein, The Washington Examiner, April5, 2019).
But, one thing that I find amazing in all of this, is that millennials appear UNAWARE that their voting choices were largely responsible for much of the above. In 2008, 18% of all voters were millennials. (By 2016, that number rose to TWENTY SEVEN PERCENT!) (Source: Pew Institute). Such large numbers could easily have swayed the election toward pro growth candidates. Instead, they voted largely Democratic. And, in 2012, when the millennials could have easily turned the election toward Mitt Romney (a very PRO GROWTH candidate that could have made an incalculable difference in the quality of their lives) an astonishing SIXTY SEVEN PERCENT (67%) voted for Obama (Source: Kevin Robillard, Politico, Nov 11, 2012). So, you might say that the millennials got what they deserved. They actually voted FOR the weak economy that has continued to bedevil them. And, unfortunately for them, it keeps coming back to them in spades. Not only are they way behind any other generation financially, there are some economists that have concluded that they will NEVER “catch up”!
Now, making predictions is hard, especially, as Yogi Berra said, about the future. So what millennials will do in 2020 is far from certain. Although the majority of them describe themselves as independents, they have tended strongly toward voting Democratic. So, if, as President Roosevelt said, “demographics are destiny”, the Democrats are, according to analysts Niall Ferguson and Eyck Freymann (Source: The Atlantic, May 6, 2919) “going to inherit a windfall.” If, indeed, the millennials vote AGAIN for the Democrats, well, it’s “deja vu all over again”: “Thank you sir! May I have another.”