Young people are more miserable than ever under Obama, according to the “Young America Foundation” misery index:
Youth unemployment in 2014 was 18.1 percent (18.1 on YMI), with almost six million young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in school or work. Many young people are simply giving up on finding employment.
Student loan debt for 2014 rings in at a record-breaking $30,000 (30.0 on YMI). Student debt has risen at an average of six percent per year since 2008, and today, 70% of college seniors graduate with student loan debt. In addition, the job market still hasn’t recovered, leaving many recent graduates with little or no income to pay back their loans.
National debt per capita for 2014 is the highest it’s ever been at $58,437 (58.4 on YMI). Young people will be stuck paying for government debt they had no part in creating, and they’ll have to do it with less discretionary income than ever before because of record-high levels of student loan debt.
Add it all up, and the YMI comes out to an astonishing 106.5 up from 98.6 in 2013.
I think the index needs to weight unemployment higher – it’s a much greater contributor to personal misery than the national debt, which is pretty abstract to most people (so far).
But it remains a fact that the kids that voted for Obama have got to be regretting the choice, someday soon here…
“But it remains a fact that the kids that voted for Obama have got to be regretting the choice, someday soon here…”
They will blame the Republicans for their problems.
What PM says. They have to understand the cause of their problems first. Now in a world where young people campaign for minimum wage hikes, I would posit that the level of youthful obtuseness rivals that of the mainstream media, which is saying something.
And the misery index resurfaces….all we need now is for Obama to start wearing a cardigan into the Oval Office and turn the heat down in the White House…..
A good example of how our biased media distorts public policy debates:
A few years ago, when oil soared to well over $100, the common wisdom, endlessly repeated by the liberal arts people that dominate our media, was that oil was a global market commodity, and there was nothing — nothing! — the US could do about the price of oil.
Oil dropped below $50/bbl today, in large part because US fracking tech has crippled OPEC.
Have you heard anyone in the MSM mention that they were 100% wrong about the simple economics of supply and demand?
If oil goes back above $100/bbl, you will again hear from MSM journalists that there is nothing — nothing! — that the US can do lower oil prices. They forget nothing, they learn nothing.
I’ve been having a bit of fun with a couple of my kids’ friends who were quite vocal about loving them some Obama at the ballot box. The dew is off the rose for some.
Correlated with MN spending …
http://view.ext.cms.oet.mn.gov/mmb/transparency-mn/
Mitch:
Don’t forget that Obama after he took over the student loan industry as part of Obamacare has been promising interest rate relief on the loans and other promises of economic aide to reduce that student loan debt.
Will Hillary do the same?
Walter Hanson
Minneapolis, MN
I can’t see Troy’s graph, but it does strike me that we ought to spend more time pointing out that purposeless government spending can and does put people out of work, generally those who are economically most defenseless to begin with.
bikebubba, government spending per se has no positive multiplier. Consumer spending does have a positive multiplier. Keynes demonstrated this. Also, every penny not spent on imports increases national GDP. Keynes demonstrated this as well.
We have fallen so far in educating our humanities majors in the humanities that journalists who to top schools do not understand that a tax cut is more of a keyensian stimulus than government deficit spending.