Real Estate Agent · Sisters, OR · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
Listening to people beat up on the young folks for having their student loans paid off. Look at this people born between 81 and 96 are getting poorer while the rest of us are getting richer. What this is really saying is people who own assets like real estate are getting wealthier and people with no assets are finding less and less opportunity. I imagine any group whether it be blacks, hispanic, whatever that had a disproportionately lower share of assets is getting disproportionatley poorer. Yes, buy real estate and cash-flowing assets, but next time you are complaining about a kid having their stupid transgender studies loan paid off be considerate of the fact this kid does not have the opportunities of the generations before him. And as mighty and righteous as you are maybe don't lecture these millennials quite as much about how hard you had it and all the jobs you had when you were 12 years old, they didn't invent helicopter parenting they are the victims of it.
Rental Property Investor · Denver, CO · Member since 2014 · 2k+ posts · 6k+ votes
4y
I believe that this data is about 8 years out of date. Millennial wealth has been skyrocketing, especially in the last few years. And, I believe Millennials are in great position to benefit from the economic realities that are ahead of us (in a relative sense).
Lower asset values mean that higher millennial paychecks buy a greater share of GDP per capita.
Fed policy of easy money ballooned asset values for the older generations over the past 10 years. That's coming to an end and was the real insidious evil that kept millennials down and ballooned inequality. Jerome Powell will inflict pain on everyone, but millennials will be hurt the least as they are entering their prime earnings years, finally getting out of debt, and will be able to buy assets in a period of higher interest rates and lower real asset values - an economy that is more "sane" than the one we just experienced for the last 5-7 years.
Older generations, particularly boomers, are exiting their prime earnings years. They must spend that wealth at some point. And the providers of those goods and services will be millennials.
None of this really addresses your point, which seems to be to sympathize with student loan forgiveness. I think that's a tricky issue. I think it's great for the folks who receive the forgiveness, and a bit unfair to taxpayers who repaid similar loans or who did not receive a college education. I don't think people will ever agree on this one.
One thing that I do think will be a benefit from the student loan debate, is that it seems that both sides can clearly agree that student loans are inflicting terrible damage on millions of individuals and society at large.
We need to stop giving them out. And significantly reform them. If we care about this problem enough to spend $300B to forgive debts for current borrowers, surely we care enough about the next generation to prevent them from taking on unreasonable student loan debt the next time around?
My vote:
1) End all federal student loan programs, privatizing the student loan market
2) Establish usury protections for borrowers (can't allow a 17/18 year old to get completely swindled as a "welcome to adulthood...")
3) Allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. Eliminate that exemption.
Within a few years, or perhaps overnight, the 80/20 of the absurdities in higher education would be eliminated. Tuition would plummet, worthless degrees would cease to exist (because no sane lender is giving an 18 year old $100K to study "fashion design" if that student can declare bankruptcy), colleges would eliminate the focus on "experience" classes would be harder, tens or hundreds of thousands of administrative positions at colleges would be eliminated, and ROI would be carefully considered by students, parents, lenders, and colleges.
So what do you do? Make the age of consent 21? Or 25?
These kids are legally adults and they expect/demand all of the other privileges that come with adulthood. So if they can legally get a loan, why shouldn't they legally be required to pay it back? At some point we have to say that some, actually lots of these kids/adults are just not very smart at analyzing risk/reward.
No one is putting a gun to their head and making them sign the loan papers, so sorry, no sympathy here - zero.
In case anyone is thinking, 'well he obviously never had kids'.....We had 2 sons go through the higher education system. We helped - a little - but not much. They figured out how to get the scholarships and grants and make it work, and no - they weren't great students in high school either.
Is that Chopsky's take? I agree we should not debate this on the platform but I think they were more ambitious the killing just the over 20 million or so people in Russia and Eastern Europe. I will leave it at that but many historians, etc vehemently disagree with that.
Real Estate Agent · Sisters, OR · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
4y
Yes I realize that. My Dad was a historian. He hated Communism for how many innocent people it killed (as do I). While the other Professors were apologizing and making excuses for the millions of dead for their ridiculous social experiment. What you say about Stalin is disputed by many great men and women and I don’t want people to think this revisionist history is without its critics.
So what do you do? Make the age of consent 21? Or 25?
These kids are legally adults and they expect/demand all of the other privileges that come with adulthood. So if they can legally get a loan, why shouldn't they legally be required to pay it back? At some point we have to say that some, actually lots of these kids/adults are just not very smart at analyzing risk/reward.
No one is putting a gun to their head and making them sign the loan papers, so sorry, no sympathy here - zero.
In case anyone is thinking, 'well he obviously never had kids'.....We had 2 sons go through the higher education system. We helped - a little - but not much. They figured out how to get the scholarships and grants and make it work, and no - they weren't great students in high school either.
True that teenagers get a loan. It is the parents that usually go over the documents and sign off the loan. As stated in while back in this post kids/adults are not very educated in terms of finances as past generations.
Real Estate Broker · Fayetteville, NC · Member since 2020 · 251 posts · 244 votes
4y
I feel a couple of ways about this. Most of the comments, of course, miss the nuance of the issue. And the reality is that there's enough blame to go around.
While Millennials have had an impressive explosion in their share of wealth over the last couple of years, it's still worth noting that it's a relatively meager amount of wealth, ringing in *still* in the single digits percentages. The argument can be made that they are younger than their older counterpart generations, and that, therefore, it's appropriate that they should have less wealth accumulation. But then it must be pointed out that the Baby Boomers, at a similar stage in their lifetimes, had a substantially higher share of national wealth.
In terms of how much wealth that is, without regard to cohort size, consider the following. On average, at the same point in their lives, Baby Boomers had approximately twice as much wealth as Millennials do now. And that is *after* adjusting for increases in consumer prices. Generation X had some 30% more wealth at the same point on their timeline. But it doesn't even stop there. We need to consider the limits of our lens of analysis. We need to consider the fact that, over time, American wealth has skewed toward the upper class across all age strata. An average accounting of Baby Boomers' wealth throughout the 1980's would be a better reflection of a randomly selected Baby Boomer than an average accounting of Millennial's wealth would today be a reflection of a randomly selected Millennial. In simpler terms, many Millennials have below the average Millennial net worth. A tiny minority of Millennials have stupendous wealth while the remaining are struggling to afford rent or buy a home. This is in contrast to the way Boomers were 40 years ago. Fewer Boomers had mega-yachts, colloquially speaking. More Boomers had more money.
Another variable. Investment opportunity. Back in the 70-90's, we were looking at risk-free rates that were as high as 10%, 15%. Today, the risk-free rate is around 2.50%. And there isn't much indication that it's going to be back up over 5% anytime soon. What this means is that Boomers not only had more relative wealth. But also that they were able to make more money for investing that wealth.
Essentially, it's inarguable that Millennials are better off than Baby Boomers were. Baby Boomers are the overall most irresponsible cohort of Americans who ever lived. Their lack of foresight and restraint, in conjunction with their penchant for tasteless opulence ensured the cessation of the Pax Americana. And what's worse is that they were so senseless that they have forced their children to live in relative poverty. And this is to say nothing of the deteriorated social fabric they've handed down to us. Half a century ago, a child would have a roughly 50% chance of making it from 0 to 18 with married parents. Today, that number, is under 10%. Then considering explosive illegitimacy rates (not a term I like, but will use for sake of discussion), divorce rates, population displacement, population replacement, and dyscivic government incentives, we no longer have a sense of national cohesion, national identity, or national duty. It's even the case that our average IQ has sunk like a rock.
No for Millennials. In particular university. We've turned university into summer camp with classes. Altogether too many Millennials go to university and we let them go way too far into debt in order to attend. And then they attend and they get useless degrees in art. Or any number of made up Social Justice liberal arts degrees. Or colleges that cobble together a few quasi-interdisciplinary classes in order to stretch their curricula to create degrees that vaguely seem useful. I'd love to have a budget allocation for community art programs so that people can have access to art education throughout their childhood and into their adulthood. That's fine. What we don't need is a university experience which involves kids going to university, enjoying all of these expensive amenities, usually living away from home, all so that a generation of Tumblrinas and TikTok kids can have Instagram university experiences. The labor market has been telling us for ages that we just don't need this many people with degrees. We don't have the capacity to employ them all. The returns on the existing economic opportunities are diminishing, therefore, we shouldn't be investing more human capital into them. Increased education finance (loan) availability is what caused this obtuse proliferation of the university experience. The addition of 40,000sqft gyms, apartment style dormitories, gourmet dining. They're charging more and giving them lower quality education.
And many Millennials agreed to this when they were as young as 17. They should have debt forgiven. It's not their fault the university system is a pile of Social Justice garbage. The Millennials deserve a break. The crime, however, is that there were no prevention measures applied to the problem. We've essentially given the nod to universities to keep coming up with useless made-up programs and increase their tuition rates and overall admissons. And we've given the nod to the marginal high school student to go ahead and attend. Because there's now a precedent for loan forgiveness. Which means it's likely to happen again in the future.
All in all, the system is more dysfunctional than most people realize. We don't have a healthy economy, we don't have a healthy university system, we don't have a healthy social apparatus. We don't even have good homes. We aren't building new ones. We built over 50 million homes between 1990 and 2010. Since then, it's been less than 10 million. We're just living off our existing stock of various types of wealth. And we seem intent on doing that until we're wholly impoverished.
Investor · Jackson, MS · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 769 votes
4y
True that teenagers get a loan. It is the parents that usually go over the documents and sign off the loan. As stated in while back in this post kids/adults are not very educated in terms of finances as past generations.
My parents never saw any of the student loans I got, let alone signed off on them. And I don't know that people today are any less educated than former generations regarding finances, but there is a larger portion of the population going to college, and hence more from lower socio-economic backgrounds. I would agree that people in generally are grossly ignorant when it comes to finances, I'm just not sure that past generations were any smarter when it came to that.
Yes I realize that. My Dad was a historian. He hated Communism for how many innocent people it killed (as do I). While the other Professors were apologizing and making excuses for the millions of dead for their ridiculous social experiment. What you say about Stalin is disputed by many great men and women and I don’t want people to think this revisionist history is without its critics.
How many people Stalin killed and is really irrelevant to the question of whether he was out to conquer Western European countries who therefore needed our protection. Historians should go with the data, not their personal loves and hatreds or how great the people who hold them are.
Sorry, but with all due respect, that means little. History has been re-written by the elites that now control the educational system. Saying you are a historian nowadays may actually/probably mean that you know nothing about real history. I heard the pap that my kids 'learned' at school and was amazed.
If I were you, I would have kept that a secret.......... :-)
Investor · Atlanta, GA · Member since 2017 · 114 posts · 82 votes
4y
Man, I can appreciate your post - but I don't know if I can agree with it. That age bracket you gave actually cuts my generation out - born in 1998 - but I know for a fact the opportunities that our generation has been given with technology, software, direct access to so many successful people have made current times the greatest opportunity for individuals to truly build wealth. I look at most of the people in my age range and see the things they do on their day-to-day and it seems to me like the reason my generation isn't truly succeeding is because they don't have the will to. A lot of people in my generation grew up in very "comfy" life situations with wealthy families and those people are the same ones that I see are struggling now that we're trying to make progress in the real world.
That said, I think the only thing making my generation's net worth drop like in the chart... is an unwillingness to put in the extra effort.
Man, I can appreciate your post - but I don't know if I can agree with it. That age bracket you gave actually cuts my generation out - born in 1998 - but I know for a fact the opportunities that our generation has been given with technology, software, direct access to so many successful people have made current times the greatest opportunity for individuals to truly build wealth. I look at most of the people in my age range and see the things they do on their day-to-day and it seems to me like the reason my generation isn't truly succeeding is because they don't have the will to. A lot of people in my generation grew up in very "comfy" life situations with wealthy families and those people are the same ones that I see are struggling now that we're trying to make progress in the real world.
Figure it out make more money. Complaining is not going to help
Man, I can appreciate your post - but I don't know if I can agree with it. That age bracket you gave actually cuts my generation out - born in 1998 - but I know for a fact the opportunities that our generation has been given with technology, software, direct access to so many successful people have made current times the greatest opportunity for individuals to truly build wealth. I look at most of the people in my age range and see the things they do on their day-to-day and it seems to me like the reason my generation isn't truly succeeding is because they don't have the will to. A lot of people in my generation grew up in very "comfy" life situations with wealthy families and those people are the same ones that I see are struggling now that we're trying to make progress in the real world.
Figure it out make more money. Complaining is not going to help
Sorry, but with all due respect, that means little. History has been re-written by the elites that now control the educational system. Saying you are a historian nowadays may actually/probably mean that you know nothing about real history. I heard the pap that my kids 'learned' at school and was amazed.
If I were you, I would have kept that a secret.......... :-)
I realize that MAGATS have little use for education. Can we move on?
Investor · Jackson, MS · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 769 votes
4y
The people who grew up with "comfy" life situations with wealthy families did not have to take out student loans. For the most part Millennials graduated during the worst recession since the Great Depression when there were few if any jobs. That meant they were late starters and just as marriages and children came the pandemic hit.
The people who grew up with "comfy" life situations with wealthy families did not have to take out student loans. For the most part Millennials graduated during the worst recession since the Great Depression when there were few if any jobs. That meant they were late starters and just as marriages and children came the pandemic hit.
I think the point I was trying to make was overlooked a little bit. Understood timing was rough - but what I’m saying is the people I know who came from comfy lifestyles are the ones who seem to be lost. The people I know who came from lifestyles where they had to struggle a little bit are the ones that are pushing forward and pursuing their goals. If someone made the decision to go to college - that’s their choice. But if you can’t afford to go, you don’t have to go. Many people are extremely successful without it. Now If someone can’t afford it, they go anyways and take a loan out to do it that’s their decision. It’s taking a risk, it’s betting on yourself and the value a college education brings you.
But if you go to school and major in “transgender studies” you aren’t really giving yourself much of a chance.
That said… no way I or anyone else should have to pay for that person to go to college. Regardless of their major.
You're just being condescending no one is arguing historians should not go with the data. Let me be blunt people who believe and say what you are saying are unwilling to look at, and or consider facts that don't support their narrative. And the argument that Stalin was done expanding communism is inaccurate and the true purpose is setting up to apologize for one of the two greatest mass murders in history. If Stalin didn't want to expand Communism then America was the aggressor correct? And that is the point I believe you really want to make. Stalin did in fact know how much of Europe America had conceded to him and was willing to lie low for a while but to say that he was not interested in expanding Communism is absurd.
If there is anyone actually reading this (LOL) google Antonio Gramasky. Especially if you want to no where this "Woke" culture evolved from. Antonio new that class warfare would not be enough to destroy Western Civilization they (the Communists) would need to corrupt all of our institutions destroy the family unit, Universities, Churches, etc. He was an evil and brilliant man. But we are living through his brain child right now.
My issue with this student loan forgiveness is that it is only going to make the problem of offer priced schooling worse.
It is as the government has increased it's involvement in student loans that the price of college tuition has risen. The colleges know they can get more money, because students pay just as much as they always have, while the college takes advantage of the added government money.
Now that student loans will be forgiven, tuition will just continue to rise even faster.
We have an over credentialing problem right now. We teach kids the only way to be successful is to get a degree. I can't make a single person who has ever said "yeah, my schooling was really useful for my career" beyond medical professionals. On the job training is far more useful for most industries. And yet most places are requiring a degree because just because reasons.
My other issue is the fact that I worked my way through college and took 5.5 years to finish my degree so I could work through school and graduate debt free. I feel like a real sucker when 4 years later, I could have just had it all for free. Forgiving student loans is going to increase inflation, and increase the tax burden. So now I get to pay for someone else's college on top of already paying my own.
Investor · Jackson, MS · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 769 votes
4y
Let me put it this way. For the last twenty years I have taught at a historically black state university in Mississippi. If an African-American woman doesn't go to college she will have very few employment options most of them earning $7.25 an hour. A man will make more but 50% of African-American males who don't finish college end up in prison in Mississippi at some point. So I have a very different perspective on all this.
Let me put it this way. For the last twenty years I have taught at a historically black state university in Mississippi. If an African-American woman doesn't go to college she will have very few employment options most of them earning $7.25 an hour. A man will make more but 50% of African-American males who don't finish college end up in prison in Mississippi at some point. So I have a very different perspective on all this.
I hear you and I understand the sales pitch that colleges push to make sure people keep giving them money. Just don’t forget colleges are for profit.
They’re just some of the best marketers & sales people around. They have so many people convinced they have to go to college to be successful. That’s why they make so much money.
Nothing wrong with it, but there’s not a single person that can’t be successful without college. Regardless of their background. Only thing someone needs to be successful is Drive and a will to be successful.
The knowledge on how to get there will come through relentless pursuit. Regardless of if that someone went to college or not.
Investor · Jackson, MS · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 769 votes
4y
And the argument that Stalin was done expanding communism is inaccurate and the true purpose is setting up to apologize for one of the two greatest mass murders in history. If Stalin didn't want to expand Communism then America was the aggressor correct?
Uh, no. No one ever asked the Eastern Europeans whether they wanted to be buffer states to the Soviet Union. And why would I consider America the 'aggressor' since we never invaded Russia (well, we did in 1917 but that was short-lived.) Sorry, but the fact that Stalin was an homicidal maniac doesn't mean he was out to conquer the world. Not does my stating this make me an apologist for Stalin or communism.
And by the way "Woke" is a term I've only heard on the lips of the alt-right. Progressives don't use it. Also, I don't know of any majors in Transgender Studies which again, the alt-right seems to want to want to focus on. At most there are some courses and concentrations in that field, but no majors.
Let me put it this way. For the last twenty years I have taught at a historically black state university in Mississippi. If an African-American woman doesn't go to college she will have very few employment options most of them earning $7.25 an hour. A man will make more but 50% of African-American males who don't finish college end up in prison in Mississippi at some point. So I have a very different perspective on all this.
And also, I think it’s wrong to be telling people of color that they’re not gonna be successful without going to college due to the color of their skin.
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems like you’re putting them down due to the color of their skin. That’s not gonna help their confidence or help them achieve their goals.
Investor · Jackson, MS · Member since 2014 · 1k+ posts · 769 votes
4y
I hear you and I understand the sales pitch that colleges push to make sure people keep giving them money. Just don’t forget colleges are for profit.
No, only a few colleges are for profit and those are the ones who have ripped off more federal monies than anyone else. I taught at a state university in case you weren't paying attention the first time.
