It is often easy to caricature the young. Today’s youth see expensive iPhones and iPads as as necessary as a prior generation’s cheap pencils and pens. Some younger people wear sneakers and shades that cost more than three months of health-care premiums. Suburban kids are as likely to be playing video games on weekend mornings as cutting the grass and raking leaves.
All that said, the aging ’60s generation has far more to answer for. We are handing over a very different America to our young people. They have received a worse education than did prior generations at a far greater cost in mostly borrowed money.
There are fewer job opportunities and higher taxes. Others ran up the huge debt; young people will largely pay for it over the next half-century. Early marriage and child-raising, a nice house, two cars, and pay-as-you-go college for the kids are all becoming a fantasy of a bygone generation.
Professors talked mellifluously about trendy green issues, gay rights, and abortion without ever explaining that those lectures came at high financial costs. “Hope and change” benevolent government sounded great to the young and idealistic. What was left out was that a captivated cohort was taken for granted and thereby seen as an easy mark to pay for it.
In short, young people have been had.
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