If ever two generations have been totally screwed before they started, Millennials and Gen Z are those generations. The gigantic cost disaster for them has made pretty much everything inaccessible. Housing, health, and education; they don’t, and much more importantly, won’t, have the money.
A small and shrinking minority of these two generations are rich or almost-rich. Generational carryover wealth is comparatively rare. They won’t stay rich at these prices, either. Ridiculous costs for everything will ensure that.
Even the idea of anything being affordable now seems beyond the scope of policy around the world. Thanks to the “Growth Uber Alles” myth of previous decades, costs are seen as growth. They’re anything but. Added cost simply reduces accessibility.
The current definition of prosperity is a timid-looking thing. What you will not see in this brittle, cowering, definition is any reference to sustainable wealth, affordability, or anything else. The definition is about currently having money and assets, and absolutely nothing else.
Language usage has a lot to answer for in economics. In boom times, everyone has enough money. Prosperity as an expression is applied with a broad brush. Life was affordable for most people. Now, very few people have big money and pretty much everybody doesn’t have enough.
The wealth of the boom times was maimed in the sub-primes crash and property market wipeouts of 2008-9 and almost destroyed the American middle class. The property market was bought up by the corporates and reinvented as the current hyper-gouging market.
Then came the massive booms in costs for health and education. The same things now cost X% more for whatever reasons, real or imaginary. The jobs market became a raffle. If you could actually afford a college degree, you might get stop/start work. You then have to get a mortgage with a massive six-digit college debt as well.
Education is critical. This is a surefire way of destroying the skills base. People can’t afford to get those skills to get the jobs to pay for anything at all. See a train wreck coming? You’re not alone.
This is economics? No, it’s not. It’s nothing of the sort. This is pure irresponsibility, managed by supposedly “educated” people. Economics, and sanity, have nothing to do with any of it. The degrees, houses and medical conditions and procedures are pretty much what they always were. It’s just that their prices are now multiples of what they were.
That’s sort of a pity, because people live on a sort of inevitable life script: Get born, get educated, get a job, and have a life and a family. Four of those five bits of the life script are now pretty iffy at best for most people.
All this happened while the Millennials were growing up. They were born and trained in a world that is now almost non-existent in terms of life script choices. There are no certainties of any kind.
The biggest employers in every state in America are typically Walmart and health insurance companies. You need $40k+ to stay out of poverty. About 30% of Americans don’t make that cut. Think about that for a minute.
Now think about the fact that this is the situation now. What’s coming can only be much worse, because nobody’s doing a damn thing about affordability on any level. Costs are being allowed to accelerate to absurd levels. Prices seem to be plucked from anywhere anyone feels like plucking them.
How can baseline costs have gone up hundreds of percent in a few years? They don’t do that. Commodities, labor, etc. are all penny-pinched or manipulated, depending on which political astrologer you consult. One way or another, the core cost base is kept low to maximize profits. That’s no accident.
Inflation – The self-inflicted atrocity
Inflation is a DIY disaster. The seeds were sown long ago in the credit market. If you borrow money at 0% or less and lend it out at credit card rates, you can’t really lose. If you borrow money at 0% and lend it out at “whole of current and future genome” costs to borrowers, everybody else can only lose. So prices go up because the market takes advantage, and low rates look affordable, even when they’re not.
Then the inevitable happens. The absurdly low rates can’t survive. Rates go up as they were always sure to do, and borrowers get slaughtered. Even the ever-smug face of the credit market looks like a head-on car crash. The prices of property go down drastically, and the big money again moves in and buys properties for much less.
Now – What if you’re a Millennial or Gen Zer who can’t even afford to enter the market in the first place? You get to pay triple rent, apparently, with even less hope of saving for a home as your money evaporates through other costs as well.
Great economics? Suicidal economics, more like. The global birth rate is falling, thanks to costs and declining fertility at catastrophic levels. (This jolly little mess will culminate in 2045 according to fertility experts. That’s just male fertility, incidentally.)
…So two new generations being multiple forms of massacred by insane cost structures won’t exactly help, now will it? Either something gets done about costs, or there won’t even be anything left to bitch about in future.
People talk a lot about affordability now, although the problems have been building for decades. How hard can it be to see the obvious?
_________________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
