Should Twentysomethings Worry?

I worked at Anagram International. They have mostly foreigners and illegal immigrants working there. When they started laying people off and forcing people to quit, they were getting rid of Americans, not foreigners. This type of thing should be illegal.

Green is the best bet. When everything collapses, green will gently take over, winding it's ivy leaves around the crumbled concrete of the White House, flexing its oak roots up through the pavement of Wall Street, carpeting with moss the Apple Store's shiny floors, lushly forgetting the civilization that crushed itself. Chlorophyl wins in the end.

...or were we not talking about real collapse? Perhaps just collapse of the elaborate game of money that overgrown children play? Well alright, money is green too.

Green is the best bet. When everything collapses, green will gently take over, winding it's ivy leaves around the crumbled concrete of the White House, flexing its oak roots up through the pavement of Wall Street, carpeting with moss the Apple Store's shiny floors, lushly forgetting the civilization that crushed itself. Chlorophyl wins in the end.

...or were we not talking about real collapse? Perhaps just collapse of the elaborate game of money that overgrown children play? Well alright, money is green too.

I HAVE BEEN *UNDER-EMPLOYED and unemployed for the 3.5 years or so since graduating from college (NYU)... COLLEGE DEGREES ARE WORTHLESS, unless you learn a vocational skill.

Having applied for jobs in every field, I am now thinking about changing courses altogether, and getting into fashion design... at least that's a SKILL.

I grew up upper middle class, in an intellectual family. I NEVER THOUGHT I'D BE DECLARING BANKRUPTCY, UNABLE TO FIND WORK, AND CONSIDERING FOODSTAMPS/ AND GOVERNMENT BENEFITS, like welfare and section 8.

THE BIGGEST SLAP IN THE FACE IS WATCHING FOREIGNERS WORK JOBS I COULD BE DOING, WHILE POUNDING THE PAVEMENT LOOKING FOR WORK, AND ********NEVER ONCE BEING COUNTED AS *OFFICIALLLY UNEMPLOYED.

I knew many, many intelligent, ivy-league graduate, hardworking people who could not find work after college.

BOOMERANG!
These writers are people who excelled and got lucky, frankly. They haven't a clue!

Seriously? You'll have to forgive me for hoping that most members of my generation don't demonstrate this kind of glibness which borders on retarded. Obviously this financial crisis impacts us in ways far exceeding minor purchasing decisions. Any other Gen-Yers out there tried to refinance that house or condo you bought a couple of years ago despite your subprime credit rating? Good luck. How about supporting a family on two middle class incomes? Again, good luck. We are the first generation to be massively saddled with debt from credit cards and school loans from the outset of our adult lives. How on earth are we going to get out from under this and survive?

I sort of enjoyed reading it. What do you think of this: http://www.brightfuture.us/new/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=158&Itemid=71

We are already screwed for one, social security.
Our generation will take all the burdens. We'll pay whole lot towards to social security and get almost nothing back. It's the biggest pyramid scheme and has lots flaws.
Government needs to stop taking money out of social security funds.
Government keeps on saying that they will pay back "someday." But when is someday?

I was also hoping to be enlightened about the impacts the economy will have on my finances as a young professional. Would have hoped fora actual useful information, not a radio show conversation.

As a 27 year old professional, I was hoping that this would be an article that would give me some useful insights on what unique impacts our country's current financial crisis could have on people my age. Alas, what I found instead was drivel that I must confess I could not stand to read through to the end, and such was the pain in my head in trying to do so that I would swear the article was stupid enough to create an intelligence vacuum around my computer's monitor, into which many of my brain cells were irretrievably sucked.

Way to go, Sarah and Kurt!

Couldn't have said it any better myself Matt. These greedy fat cats sitting in their lofty skyscrapers have been pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers for years. In the last 40 years the median salary in the United States has grown from roughly $30k per year to $40k per year. In the last ten years alone the average salary for C level executives has doubled. Former Fannie Mae CEO "earned" $19M last year. Instead of teaching these people a lesson and forcing them to face the music for the horrible decisions that led to this economic disaster, we are in the process of bailing them out. They get their cake and they get to eat it too. Accountability and responsibility in business practice is headed down the same drain that we saw honesty and integrity go. I for one hope it spirals out of all control... perhaps when these individuals feel the world collapse around them they will realize their folly.

kurt is right. where do taxes come from? what we are experiencing is boomer economics, and boomer leadership. it's a mess piled on mess. 7 trillion in tax deficit already, 30k for everyone man woman and child in the country. of the 300 million people in the us, most of us are under 40, meaning dying boomers won't have to pay for the deficits and this bail out. we will!

incorrigible. kurt points out that as small business don't have access to credit or cash prices go up, keeping young americans from spending their trillion dollars a year and closing down small businesses that most often employee young americans. (small businesses account for the lions share of the GNP)

young americans should be pissed. really pissed. boomer economics pissed in the drinking water.

Matt Murray
Exec. Director
American Assoc. of Young People
www.theaayp.org

Where did you find these two? It certainly wasn't at any reputable journalism school. They, and this article, are a disgrace to our generation.

A lot of people in Wall Street and elsewhere are feeling the effects profoundly today. For us "millenials", I think that it's more our future that has been mortgaged - so to speak - than our present.

If you have bad credit card debt, you were screwed before, and you're screwed now. If not, your life is probably fairly "baseline" still. If you were one of the early ones to purchase a home, you might be in trouble if you did it poorly. If you're renting (as many, many of us are), there probably doesn't seem to be reason to sell the silverware just yet, but the horizon starts to look very gloomy when one considers job prospects and taxation down the road to pay for all this ***. We'll be doing it well into our forties or beyond.

On the whole, I really feel like the older generation has sold the younger one right down the river on this. Not all of them have, but it seems we will be bearing the tax burden for a lot of greedy old men's selfish decision-making for a decade and a half of our lives at least. I wonder if some of these men could look at their own children and grandchildren and ever realize that they're going to be handing their offspring a very ruined economy in years to come.

I've met the kinds of guys who have handed us this mess before. They're pieces of work - sly, charming, frequently brilliant in just about all ways but the human one. They understand everything about financial markets except the fact that they are interconnected and that you can't just take away from it forever without giving back.

Of course, the American public has to own up to a lot of this too, for signing ARM's and other things that they never should have agreed to at risky rates.

Overall, a lot of bad lending, and a lot of people taking them up on it.

For my generation, I want to say - let's try to take some responsibility, guys. Both for trying to restore prosperity to our economy, and for contacting and voting for representatives who won't agree to bail out lizard-eyed CEOs at packages hundreds of thousands of times what we receive.

Oh, and great way to represent our generation; drinking at bars and iPods. We millenials just hop from bar to bar listening to our iPods.

I'm a twenty-something and worried as hell. I just started a new job, and with it a new 401(k) and Roth IRA. I didn't invest in any financials, but I worry what they ripple effect will be for me.

"ABOVE ALL things I hope that the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty." Thomas Jefferson

As a public high school teacher, the current state of our public institutions reflect our values as a society, from my point of view. We are bailing out these failing institutions with taxpayer dollars while the state of our public school system continues to decline. Good teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing.

Voters: Compare the SUPPORT (money) we're being asked to give private organizations to bail out these failures versus the kind of support our public schools need to effectively help all of our children. Where should our tax dollars go?

No child left behind is a law that requires improvements without funding to implement these improvements. Schools are listed as "failing schools" and lose funding (no bailout here) because of unrealistic goals that are not funded by this mandate in the first place. What is left in our public schools is often a stressed out skeleton staff that does not have the ability to properly educate our students, who we hope will lead us and support us when we are old?

Meanwhile, these corporate lobbyists have effectively secured deregulation, loopholes, and what they consider "optimal" conditions for their financial success. And a few well-connected people have lined their pockets with enormous amounts of money.

This sort of short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth has infected our entire way of running our society.

Unfortunately young people (the MAJORITY) of our future do not have the money or the resources to hire lobbyists. Their teachers and their schools have limited resources. And there are few organized efforts to effectively reform our schools to prepare our future. In every other developed and developing country we compare our students' progress with, there are serious efforts to improve, fund, and prioritize education.
THIS IS INVESTMENT IN OUR MOST IMPORTANT RESOURCE: HUMAN CAPITAL!

In America, we are starving our schools while bailing out reckless fat cats who've thrived on greed. Is this the American Way? Or have we lost our way?

Hopefully (as we say in school) we will learn from all of this and use it to improve, grow, and succeed