Young adults today: No school, no job, living at home with mom and dad

It would probably be better for one's earning potential to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to perform tasks that are highly valued by employers. In this information age, I don't know of any such knowledge that can't be learned for free or for a nominal fee on the internet.

 

OUR "AMERICAN DEMOCRACY"

That's only one part of Education. The other, and far more important component, is learning about the world in which we live. Otherwise, we are overwhelmed by nonsense on the BoobTube - whereupon some people are led to believe that the most important achievement on earth is Whoever Wins the Superbowl.

And that is precisely where America has gone - up the BoobTube.

From Psychology Today (2012): Television Effects on Education, Revisited - excerpt:

I could go on, but the responses to the question "the effects of television on learning" are simply too long to repeat here. Besides, above, you've got the general message.

If we (the sheeple) want "American Democracy" to wade forever in the miasma of political ignorance and indifference* it need only continue as it has. I repeat, "the political system of the US as expressed by the majority-voting of an unfair Electoral College (U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1 as well as the 12th Amendment) and the unabridged use of Gerrymandering (first used in 1812) are both banes upon effective governance of the nation".

We must do away with both that date from a time in history when most Americans could neither read-nor-write, which caused our "founding fathers" (all reasonable and intelligent people) to think that our nation was neither ready nor fit for a truly representative democracy without "tweaking". Many perhaps thought the fledgling nation was beset by "demagogic factions".

It should be obvious to all of us that such is no longer the case - the will of the people must be mandated by a popular-vote** in all instances ...

*Pew Research of voter-participation internationally - here: U.S. trails most developed countries in voter turnout
**And it would help if Civics Class was a mandatorily "passed subject" in order to graduate from high-school.

 

NOT BORN A GENIUS

I question your system of "value judgement", which I find lopsided.

All you have written justifies Tertiary Education as a means of obtaining Higher Salaries. I have never disputed that argument. I am one who has benefitted as such.

The point I am making is that of a far more important achievement in education. It is the ability to reason within a realm of factual evidence - and to express that reasoning in terms of both national and state/local governance. And I maintain it is fundamentally a tertiary-level of education that permits most people (like me and perhaps you) who were NOT BORN geniuses to do so.

 

AGE CHANGE

The law, me arse. We have hundreds of laws in the nation, some perfectly idiotic.

Like the Electoral College devised by Congress (U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1).

Governance of the nation is a real-time continuous project, not something anchored in the highly antiquated past of the 19th-century Agricultural Age (when most Americans could neither read nor write). It was pre-Industrial which also is also coming to its end as we advance into the Information Age.

The world advances whilst Uncle Sam remains anchored in a manner of political governance that is antiquated and as a result both unfair and unjust ...

 

So in other words, I'm right, but you don't have a cogent argument, so you write a bunch of bullshit.

 

people like Trump need to stop outsourcing our jobs, time to bring the jobs home and tax those that outsource our jobs

 

From your previous posts, it sounds like you are saying that the currently available jobs require skills that people are lacking. Can you give an example of such a skill?

 

I do. Hundreds.

For instance: Go find a company that is going to let you plan, organize and implement a sophisticated robotics manufacturing system - and you cannot show any guaranty of competence in the subject by means of training.

Just try it - you wont even get a job interview ...

 

That is correlation, not causation. The only thing that truly hinders a single parent is drive. I know single parents who have done well in life, so your premise is false.

 

YOU know people who have done well so MY premise is false.

Wow! Do you walk on water as well ... ?

 

First of all it's not my premise, its the premise of the studies done on the subject.

Second, you might notice that the number in the poverty rate isn't 100%.

Third, clearly $9,900 a year for a family of 3 is hindering them.

Fourth, largely I agree that most people are in poverty due to a lack of drive as one of the reasons.

 

What?

 

I wouldn't. I blame the BoobTube which has an overwhelming influence on American attitudes and beliefs. And I don't call it "boob" for nothing ...

 

In your house. Not all houses, thankfully.

Sieg Heil! Do you actually like playing Hitler ... ?

 

"Some" people do not make "all people".

Meaning, "the exception to the rule is not the rule" ...!

 

When you see that happen, take a picture.

It almost never happens (it's just pure theory of absolutely no actual relevance), especially in a country that has allowed significant market consolidation (aka "oligopolies") as has the US in the past 30-years.

So, markets do not "clear", they just settle into oligopolistic pricing:
*The major company (volume) sets the price.
*Two or three others occupy secondary/tertiary positions and keep prices in reference to the head oligopolist.
*All three/four companies rake in the profits to larger and less degrees.

Which, also, has a profoundly negative impact upon Consumers, because the lack of competition is not a break against higher prices ...

 

Again, no cogent response, so you respond with insults. Are you really that weak of a debater?

It's called loving my sons. If they are able, they need to do something useful for society, be it a paying job, increasing their own skills, or volunteer work. What would you do? Allow able-bodied men to live in your house, sleep late and spend all day on the couch watching TV and playing videogames, while you work to provide them with food, etc.? Seriously, what would you do in that situation? At least in my house, somebody benefits other than the electric company. There is much volunteer work that the elderly people at my church would love assistance with during the week.

(I'm not talking about sons with disabilities (temporary or permanent), but healthy able young men who should be contributing to society in one way or another.)

 

Well, it's almost like that - but not quite.

That is, "the bank" in question is the FRB; which lends "operational money" to banks who must retain a "reserve quantity" decided by the FRB.

When the FRB thinks that the economy is overheating, it can reduce Demand by undertaking either or both of two actions:
*Increase the reserve amount that banks must hold, and thus they have less to lend, or
*Increase the bank-rate, which is the rate at which the FRB loans money to banks. Who then loan to customers at higher rates, making purchases bought on loans that much more expensive.

The creating money bit has another half of the story to be told. The money "rented" to banks are then lent/mortgaged out to Consumers who buy goods/services. The longer the loan's "term", if the loan is made at fixed-rates the dollar mortgage-payments made to banks over time can become worth less and less if interest-rates increase significantly. Which is why in the amortization of a loan, the repayments often start off with a higher loan repayment part than interest payment part.

Why did some very big bank-failures occur due to SubPrime Loans? Because the number of mortgage-payment failures became enormous. Why? Because one helluva lotta very-stoopid-people would try to "flip a condo" (or any habitable property) in a very short period of time having bought the condo at high-rate loans. They were stuck with them when the properties could not be resold. Meaning they went personally bankrupt.

And that factor clattered all the way up the line back to the bigger lending banks, some of which failed. So, ask yourself. Why in hell did those responsible for estimating loan-risk give Triple-A ratings to the (SubPrime) mortgages that Investment Banks had "packaged" and sold to investors around the world that ultimately failed?

And which of the banksters went to jail for this colossal fraud?

Not a one ...

 

IDEAS AND VALUES

Your problem is that you have only one yardstick. Money, money, money.

It is by and large not the only measurement, and really quite distant from the best one. And what might that be?

Pride in the work that you are competent at doing, which shows a real contribution to society by any measurement one might want to apply. With one exception. That of monetary value - dollar and cents indicate monetary value, and it is an incompetent measure in the progress of mankind.

It's not by money-value that we might measure how well or not a society progresses, but from its ideas and values;

And foremost amongst them as we enter this new century is Societal Justice ...

 

Your talking serious debt this is not 1950 where you could attend a State University and pay for it with summer jobs or your parents paying out of pocket from their income and it didn't hurt much, if your going to a college and it going to be say $25,000 in debt at a State school for a bachelors and you have it largely paid for then fine, but if its debt you owe it to yourself to land a decent job with a decent chance out of it. Go to a private school its going to be more sometimes a lot more.

Now if your from a wealthy family and your going to go into the family business or something then going to college is worth it your going to be a societal leader by default so a good education is valuable even if its in a soft subject.

Like I said is getting a four year terminal degree if your not going on going to benefit you for the money spent, for some definitely and others its possibly a poor investment on the dollars in for the income but you are looking at a long term career so maybe a study government job or something is very much worth it in the long run.

But if the parents are paying then they have every right to dictate where you go and what you study.

 

Hm, that's not what I asked. I asked if someone could learn the skill.

 

Yes, markets clear when the supply and demand intersect. That's econ 101.

 

I think it's always been difficult for young adults in America--or most of them anyway--trying to start off on their own. But now--and I mean about 10 years ago--it's gotten harder than it was before, to the point that there's a substantially greater portion of young adults who won't be able to make it.

I don't know but if I had to guess, I would guess that proportion has about doubled. I mean young adults who just won't be able to go out on their own, or won't end up doing so for whatever other combination of reasons.

You take a bunch of people that were just barely able to make things work out, and you make things just a little more difficult for them, well guess what? Now they can't make it. Things got pushed over the tipping point.

I really see things having started in 2004-2005 but culminating in 2007, maybe reaching a peak in 2009, and it went on till 2011. Now there's a whole "lost generation" that got left behind. Things have improved somewhat, but the trend hasn't fully reversed. Anecdotal evidence, 3 years ago there were college grads living in tent encampments around where I am. (In all fairness though that college didn't exactly have a great reputation)

Well it is concerning, because if young adults are our future, what does that say about the future of the country?

 

Since you enjoy talking at me rather than to me, allow me to correct you....

Increasing reserve requirements does not affect how much a bank can lend because banks do not lend reserve to customers.

Increasing reserve requirements simply draws money out of circulation so it can be held in reserve accounts, which are little more than funds that banks use to settle each day's transactions.

In the end, decreasing reserves does not affect the avalibility of funds to lend, it affects the price which they are lent at.

Two thoughts, first, since 2008 the Fed has changed the way it manipulates the interest rates by paying interest on excess reserves as reserve ratios are higher than normal (this contradicts your first claim). Second thought, even when targeted interest rates, it did so by selling securities and drawing reserves out of the system increasing the scarcity of reserves and presumably increasing the cost.

While there are some important distinctions to be made when discussing the creation of credit money by banks vs how the federal government creates money, banks do create money (I like to think of it as credit creation denominated in the governments unit of account) because the credit money that banks create is finite and lasts only as long as the term of the loan that created it. It's only when the sum of all lending exceeds the sum of all repayments that the amount of money (credit) created by private bank lending cause the amount of bank credit money in the economy to increase.

Banks don't lend "rented" money. They create it from nothing.

Is it stoopid people? Really? Would you lend your money to someone if you didn't repay? If you did and they didn't repay, is it the people that borrowed that are stoopid or the people that lent?

Worse, when a bank lends, it's risking the money of others. Sure, CEO's and other executives have their own money tied up in the banks they run, but they often hold preferred stock and get paid first when a bank goes under. Thus the people left holding common stock are hurt the most.

Vetting potential borrowers are the cornerstone of the banking industry. The lending banks, loan origination companies, brokers and commercial banks thought they had found a way to mitigate the risk by selling bad debt back to the public, something to touch on below....

Well, that's easy. Deregulation of the banking industry. Standard and Poors, Moody's and Fitch are tasked with rating financial products. When the industry realized that the game was up, the rating agencies refused to lower the ratings on MBS'. Investors at that point were shorting the positions held by commercial banks and if the rating agencies had lowered the ratings on MB's when they should have, The commercial banks would have suffered HUGE losses. So the rating agencies, funded by the very banks that stood to lose trillions, artificially propped up ratings to give commercial banks time to sell off investments they knew were worthless. Those soon-to-be-worthless investments ended up in in peoples retirement accounts, pension funds city and state investments and the private sector bore the brunt.

The increase in the deficit was simply a shift in private sector losses to the public sector as a result of what I just laid out.

Banksters, politicians, regulators and ultimately the ideology of the right. All deserve a share of the blame.

In fairness, there is some blame to go around on the left as well, but, personally, I'd put the greats blame on the "free market" people who think the economy can regulate itself.[/QUOTE]

 

Dead wrong. You "listening"? I repeat, Dead wrong.

The purpose of the "reserve" is expressly to allow the FRB to control the money-supply available to the public.