The Partisan Divide on Issues

[David Horn]

(02-19-2020, 01:55 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(02-19-2020, 09:46 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: My GI father had a favorite saying, one he uttered to his Boomer son it seems far too often.  “The problem is, you feel like the world owes you a living.”  He knew better.  He grew up in such bad times that he knew the world owed him nothing.  He would have to seize it.  That thought eventually stuck.  Like much of my generation, I put enough into school to get a decent job and saved for retirement.  Today I get flack for it.

That seems to me to be the biggest difference between the GIs and their supposed heirs as civics, the Millennials.  The Millennials are so used to daddy as an individual and the boomers in general taking care of them that they really do believe the world owes them a living.  If they can’t save for retirement, no big deal.  The world owes them a living.  It must be a nice belief to have, the idea that the cliff they are speeding towards must not exist seems neat.

There's every evidence that the GIs were the exact same way until reality hit them in the form of WWII.  Before that, the Missionaries were taking care of them with the New Deal, WPA, etc., as if the world did owe them a living.

I’m not sure I really want to go down this road, but here goes anyway. Flash: the Millennial generation is saving like crazy. That’s particularly true, considering their tendency to be underemployed. What they aren’t doing is buying houses. Other than that, they are AOG in comparison to both Gen-X and their mostly Boomer parents. I know that runs counter to accepted wisdom but it’s true nonetheless. 

We can also discuss deficit financing in the age of too much savings. The old rules are collapsing and the new ones are counterintuitive. But the math doesn’t lie. It’s one of the main reasons the stock market keeps going up when it is clearly overvalued. FWIW, I haven’t adjusted to the new economy either.