Everything is (not) Awesome!
One of my themes, is that any understanding of the Trump phenomenon has to have “economic factors” right at the top of the list, or the explanation is wanting.
There’s the obvious loss of rural power and opportunity which showed up on the county election maps, but there’s also the loss of faith among the young.
And by “young” I mean people 30 years old or younger.
The American Dream is over, and has been for a long time, and that shows up in statistics like this:
Barely Half of 30-Year-Olds Earn More Than Their Parents
Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents. Even rapid economic growth won’t do much to reverse the trend.
Economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard and the University of California set out to measure the strength of what they define as the American Dream, and found the dream was fading. They identified the income of 30-year-olds starting in 1970, using tax and census data, and compared it with the earnings of their parents when they were about the same age.
In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age, they found. In 2014, that number fell to 51%.
The percentage steadied for around a decade and plunged again starting in 2002, according to the economists.
The paper doesn’t provide specific reasons for the declining fortunes of younger Americans, but it generally blames the slowdown in economic growth and, especially, the widening income gap between the wealthy and the rest of society.
“Wages have stagnated in the middle class,” said Mr. Chetty in an interview. “When you’re in that situation, it becomes very hard for children to do better than their parents.”
So not only are the rural hurting, but the young. If these young folks could not bring themselves to vote for Trump, perhaps they were equally uninspired to show up for Hillary whose slogan “Stronger Together” seems to fall flat if “together” does not mean everyone.
The policies of the two main parties have left out the vast majority of the population, especially an cruelly the young who take out student loans and then discover that their elders decided, in their infinite wisdom, to make student debt the only non-dischargeable debt in the land.
Great optics there, older folks!
Further, when the Fed decides to ram up house prices because that would be good for existing homeowners (it’s really not, but that’s the story they are running with) they are specifically, again, punishing the young.
What sort of society treats their young this way?
Not a healthy one, that’s my opinion.