Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
I Get Why the Kids Like Bernie
My children are in their early twenties and just starting out. Neither one of them studied anything particularly lucrative (Film; Art). They take after their old man that way (Drama).
But when I was starting out, I had little trouble getting a job with a Chicago restaurateur who gave me all the work I wanted tending bar and waiting tables. I did not have to deal with a 29 hour per week limit to avoid Obamacare requirements. I could get 40 hours no problem. After 40 hours I would work off the clock for tips only, which was just fine with me. All in all, I could count on about $700 per week.
My share of the rent in a clean, comfortable apartment in upscale Lincoln Park was $375/mo. Student loans? I carried a grand total of $11,000. Tuition at my high-tone, private, liberal arts alma mater was never more than $9K per year, and I paid a lot of it along the way. (None of this $55K per year nonsense.) My monthly loan payment was $197. Buy health insurance? Are you kidding? I’m 24. Who’s gonna make me buy insurance anyway!
Nowadays, my similarly artsy kids are starting their lives out in Southern California making about the same hourly rate I did 30 years ago–$20/hr. But they can’t get 40+ hours a week from any entry-level employer because of Obamacare, which forces employers to provide health coverage to “full time” employees (a deal-breaking expense). And “full time” is 30 hours per week, not 40. That means precious few entry-level employers provide true, 40-hour, full-time work.
But here’s where it really gets bad: Their rent is three times what I paid, and their apartments and neighborhoods are worse. Their student loan debt is four times what mine was. They are legally obliged to purchase their own health insurance, which is not cheap.
When my kids grumbled to me about this, I put it off as the same kind of gripes I had when I was doing my own struggling artist thing.
Then, as I was fielding these gripes, I had to travel to Southern California to do a jury trial. (Yes, I quit the arts for law school.) During the judge’s voir dire, he asked all the jurors about their living arrangements (Alone? Roommates? Children? etc.)
How’s this for a wake-up? Every twenty-something juror was living with his/her parents. Every one.
Well hey, dummy-daddy, of course, they were. Given the disincentives to employers to provide full-time entry-level work, the magnitude of student debt, and the ridiculous housing costs, living with the folks is the only sure way to stay afloat if you are starting out in Southern California with starting-out skills. Get a second job? Not so fast. Let’s remember the Southern California labor market in 2020 includes about 1 million additional seekers of full-time work who shouldn’t even be there (illegal aliens), so getting even one entry-level job is a struggle. I never had to compete with that.
I knew bad public policies had stuck these kids with excessive student debt, excessive housing costs, no full-time entry-level jobs, and a tight market for part-time entry-level jobs, but watching these young jurors confess to the judge they were living with their parents (and unsuccessfully hiding their embarrassment at it) really brought it home.
So now what happens? My kids look at their social media feeds and here comes ol’ Bernie promising relief: forgiveness of student loan debt, plenty of “affordable” housing, and an increase in pay at their crappy, part-time, entry-level jobs.
Stupid? Of course, it is. But at least it’s something. Because what are the conservative Republican remedies that will make a difference for these kids right now? Ending the government loan program? (Too late for them.) Easing restrictions on housing construction? (How many decades before rents drop?) Abolishing the minimum wage? (Hey! Wrong direction, bub!)
I was thinking of suggesting to my kids that they (like their peers on my jury) move back in for a while. It would give me an opportunity to talk up the virtues of free markets and conservative public policy.
I can see however that they might be too demoralized to listen, that they will keep struggling away, and come November they might, hope-against-hope, vote for Bernie.
Published in Politics
My nephew is a bookish kid, nerdy, can talk manga, RPGs and comics all day long. When told there was no one to pay college (or cosign loans), he opted to sign up to be an electrician. Did well at it for a while. Later moved to Portland and he is now a janitor. Doesn’t owe student loans.
Respectfully PT, I think the data show the buggy whip/arts analogy could not be more wrong.
Peak buggy whip demand was probably in the early 20th century. It’s gone now. As for the arts, there might have been a time in human history when there was higher consumer demand for artistic work product than today, but I can’t think of it. There might have been a time when more people were employed in the arts than today, but I can’t think when that might have been.
As we all know from dodging distracted, hunched-over pedestrians, every human being in the developed world now owns his own movie theatre, television, art gallery, photo gallery, symphony hall, rock venue, and library with instant access to artistic work product from all over the world, twenty-four hours a day. And the data show they are accessing it all the time. I was happy to encourage my kids to go into the arts because, it seems to me, there is more opportunity in the arts now than there has ever been.
We’ve been trying to convince active, hands-on kids to forgo becoming welders and go to college so turn about is fair play. But seriously, some people should go to college and some should not. All about choice.
True. There is no point in human history where people have so much free time to indulge in leisure activities – to include partaking of the arts. Still doesn’t pay well or regularly for the vast majority of aspirants.
However this does remind me of a conversation I had with a buddy of mine. His son is a dancer and was accepted to a serious dance college in NYC (I want to say Julliard, but I don’t know). Kid went there on a scholarship. Quit after a year.
So I ran into the dad in the breakroom one day and he was chapped that his kid quit. In the course of our discussion a couple of things got hashed out. First, the kid was stuck learning things he already knew and even the more advanced stuff were things that he could already do. Second, he already had a job with a dance company in LA.
The most important thing, I think was that dancing is ephemeral. You are always one injury away from retirement and even if that doesn’t come to pass you have a short shelf life (at least compared to a normal working career). All this means is that if you decide to dance now you can plan to start your accounting career later (after the injury or the expiration of the shelf life) just plan to be a non-traditional student. Once dad and I figured his out, he was ok with the plan.
Worked out well for the kid too, he went from LA to Disney China to a cruise ship and now he is in a show in Vegas.
But if you are going to school the first degree should be the economically viable one (unless, as in my case, the job they are going into doesn’t really care what the degree is).
Interesting. I was never tempted to give my kids the “study something economically viable” advice because, in my personal experience, one of the truly wonderful characteristics of American culture is this it is always possible to step back, regroup, and redirect your life. And nobody will hold it against you.
I got two useless arts degrees and worked in entertainment industry for ten years, but I couldn’t make it pay to any decent standard. I reassessed, went to law school, and have been practicing for twenty years. If I stay healthy, I’m going to do just fine. And in no time in my career have I ever gotten the sense from any client/boss/colleague that I am any less of an attorney for having started “late.”
I specifically chose the 30’s as representative of the collapse in value of buggy-whip fabrication skills.
Consumer demand? Absolutely. Arts employment numbers? Not so believable. Have you any stats to back that up?
If there were, there wouldn’t be all this hand-wringing about finding jobs for arts majors, or the plaintive cries for their student loans to be forgiven. There may be more art and entertainment media on the market than ever before, but it seems to be getting done without drying up the oversupply of “talented” artists, actors, writers, et al. Or if they’re working, they aren’t being paid enough to pay off their loans.
Your assertions are in direct contradiction of the facts of outstanding student loan balances, stats on young adults purchasing homes, and the corresponding stats on them having to
sponge off oflive with mom and dad. Should I believe you or my lying eyes?My goal is to not have my kids spend the money or the time figuring this out, let them learn from the wisdom of others.
I wouldn’t figure that anyone would think that. Plenty of room for non-traditional students.
I like this video from Prager U on the same topic. Mike Rowe says it so well.
Now that you asked:
https://data.bls.gov/projections/nationalMatrix?queryParams=27-0000&ioType=o
In case the link does not work, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects 96.8% growth in “Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations” over the next 10 years. Not a bad time to get into the biz.
Interesting.
I tried to figure out how to look at the matching history but couldn’t quickly figure out the BLS archives. A ten-year forecast with no context doesn’t inspire confidence.
I love Mike Rowe too, Instugator. And he’s right. But looking back, I wouldn’t trade my “figuring it out” years for anything. I met Mrs. Gunner, made many friends, saw the country, had a lot of good times, and though I didn’t know it at the time, developed skills that I use everyday in the law biz.
There are many things besides welding. And mostly I was answering the post referring to children who went to college already and found it wasn’t a good fit. Just because someone is “bookish” doesn’t mean they will actually be good at math or other such technical or academic skills. But they need to find something they can to do support themselves and maybe a family. What would your alternative be, maybe relying on Nancy Pelosi’s “you can do whatever you want and don’t worry about affording anything because it will be provided for you?” Generations of people have worked at jobs they didn’t especially enjoy, but which gave them the opportunity to be “bookish” at home if they so desired.
I lost mostly, Two lawyers, one MS in Anthropology, one French major and a firemen who owns a nice house worth close to a million $ in CA.
what year was your second son born?
what year was your second daughter born?
I’m guessing son was born before 1966 and daughter was born after 1966
Milton Friedman made a similar comment about his bypass surgeries.
his second one was more expensive than the first but it wasn’t because of better facilities or more modern surgical techniques or better doctors.
Medical is horrible.
She should get an obama care plan, covered CA, which also has many problems but still better than Medicaid.
we need to stop federal subsidized student loans
that would be step one
AMA membership is under 25% today.
what happened? why did AMA membership drop?
Milton Friedman was a fierce critic of AMA and medical licensing in general.
He hated all licensing in all fields.
the fireman has the highest net worth among your kids?
this is interesting
A firefighter is not a yuppie profession, i suppose you classify it as manual labor.
but he is also a member of a public sector union that will bankrupt California
Firefighters also have great risks and not just from fire directly, they also get a lot more cancer and etc.
Loan forgiveness is immoral, stealing from people to pay for the poor choices of others.
Bailing out bankers isn’t the rule. It’s a rare exception that on one occasion was necessitated by an existential threat to the nation. Even during that time a number of banks went under.
And was immoral.
And the money should have gone to forgiving loans and those who lost insured funds. Banks should have lost for writing bad loans.
You can argue how immoral loan forgiveness is, but I see no one saying how immoral it was for banks to be bailed out.
You can say how bailing people our leads to perverse incentives, but you ignore the perverse incentives for banks to keep writing loans that won’t ever be paid back. At some point, the lenders should take a look and think “hey – this 28 year old kid is going to be paying off debt for 50 years at his income. Maybe we shouldn’t write him another loan.” There’s no incentive not to capitalize on it.
Lenders don’t eat their losses. We do.
You seem to think it is the banks deciding which students get loans. Government took that decision away from them decades ago, in return for repayment guarantees. Any bank that turned down a student loan for whom the Feds approved a guarantee would be sued for discriminatory lending practices. And since Obama nationalized the program, the banks are out of the loop. You keep harping on the banks in this situation, but they aren’t to blame.
Now, the bank bailout that was part of the housing crisis response was indeed a fiasco. But that was due to extremely bad behavior by Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac, two government-sponsored pseudo-corporations (aka GSEs). They were selling bad mortgages as good to the bankers, and then the bankers were getting stuck with the crud. There’s a case to be made that the bankers shouldn’t have taken the losses set up by the GSEs. And the people who got mortgages that shouldn’t have generally lost their homes. As they should have–it was the deal they signed to get that mortgage. Just like students with stupid loans have to suck it up and pay, ‘cuz they signed up for it. If they didn’t understand what they were getting into, and feel they need to have somebody else pay, maybe they should be suing their HS guidance counselors and their own parents.
What is the common thread linking these two financial crises? Government promises. Student loan forgiveness would be another stupid and dangerous government promise. The best historical parallel would be Reagan’s amnesty for illegal immigrants. Sounded like a good idea at the time, with promises to clean up the system, but didn’t turn out so well. Wouldn’t be any different with student loans.
The student loan program needs to be shut down for any non-remunerative degree program. First rule of holes: stop digging.
Then he should learn how to run CNC machines. Being a machinist nowadays is a computer-heavy job, more like 3-D printing.
Also, electronics repair. At the high end, you are repairing scientific instruments and getting massive cash while the PhDs are waiting on your work.
Rad protection. If you are young and mobile, start working the outages. You need to understand physics and be detail-oriented. The high end rad protection jobs at nuclear plants had incomes on the level of plant management.
If you are really smart, there is the elite of the blue collar jobs – nuclear reactor operators. Expect more exams than college, intense pressure, being expected to deliver excellence every day, and working on one of the most complex systems in existence. There’s a reason one of the biggest costs for nuclear power plants is salary – not just anyone can be a reactor operator.
The problem was, as Phil says above, the government mandate forcing banks to take crappy loans. That’s the same issue with student loans. The government forces the loan to be a guaranteed deal. If the lenders were on the hook, well, that would mean a lot less student loans. And lots of cries of racism.
Before you jump on me Stina, please understand. I have negative net assets despite a solid job, as I owe over 80 grand in student loans. About the only nice thing is that I can take the interest off my taxes. I might be able to take PSLF, but that is looking less likely. I think any loan forgiveness should target a specific need that the US has. Hell, allow employers to treat loan payments like health insurance – tax-free compensation. We could do the same for big government projects that need unskilled / semi-skilled labor – like the Wall.
Fixing the current loans would be bad, but we absolutely must do something about the new loans. The colleges need to be partly on the hook, and aid needs to target majors that are in demand, not anything with studies in the name.
This.
Plus what Phil said.