Girl vs Robot: Help Me, Bro!
Unemployment is up, firms are closing and shipping jobs overseas. Financial institutions are consolidating and maintaining profits, but still wary of lending, which is slowing economic development and new business creation. Stimulus money is starting to be spent, but is mainly keeping jobs from disappearing rather than creating new ones. But the economic reports, as terrible as they are, are hiding something far more sinister.
Ten years before the current recession, we started to see lower independence, employment, and financial stability in an important sector of the economy: the young. Twenty-four percent of workers under 35 say they do not make enough money to pay their monthly bills. One in three are currently living with their parents for financial reasons.
While some of this can be blamed on the increasing amount of debt needed to complete college combined with the shrinking coffers of this generation's parents that would have otherwise been used to pay for college, part of it is an increasingly tight job market for new workers. Entry-level positions are flowing overseas leaving behind only the middle-rung positions tasked with bringing together the base elements produced in other places. Many young workers were able to find jobs in the cracks, but the economic collapse of 2008 brought the problem into harsh highlight.
Young workers were the first to go and entry level positions disappeared. One can hardly get a job cleaning toilets without proof of five years experience in Restroom Management. And now, a few months into this recession, we see numbers like those above.
The young vote should be important to Obama, of those aged 35 and younger, thirty-five percent voted for the first time in the last election, overwhelmingly or Obama. Three quarters of those now keep up with political news between elections. This generation of workers is seeing their oppertunities for career advancement pass them by and are contributing to an ever-increasing glut of entry-level seekers that the market will find almost impossible to fill even given the rosiest of projections.
So faced with these problems; what do they want? They favor public investment over reduction of the deficit by a twenty-two point margin. They rank reducing taxes, government spending and regulation on business among the five lowest of sixteen long-term priorities for congress. Put simply, they want the government to invest in America, and them.
They not out of line. If we stagnate for too long with a glut of underskilled workers fighting over entry-level positions, it will drive wages down and reduce consumption. Economic recovery will be painfully slow and endemic poverty will increase. At the same time, there will come a point when retirement begins to take workers that cannot be easily replaced from the underskilled pool, and productivity and innovation will suffer. Allowing a generation of workers to rot on the vine is possibly one of the worst economic moves America could make, already faced with offshoring, increasing foreign competence and innovation, and the reduced prestige America has suffered due to the economic collapse. Obama has said he wants to invest in American business, and the stimulus bill has started to do so, but it remains to be seen if actual industry creation will result as opposed to status-quo infrastructure upkeep.
More urgently, thirty-one percent of workers under 35 do not currently have health insurance. Of those, seventy-nine percent report they are uninsured due to economic constraints rather than choice. They want the publi option, and a strong one. Mandating that these workers purchase weak and ineffective insurance through the private sector or co-ops that they can not afford to begin with will not be a decision from Obama that they can stomach.
Much of the opposition to health care and stimulus spending comes from a demographic that is much more economically stable than the young. Retired workers are already provided with government health care and the middle-aged middle-management will be able to hang onto their jobs, even if they find themselves doing more work because they had to let the entry-level assistant go.
Concerned as he is with satisfying the aging Republican dempgraphic, Obama risks alienating a motivated voting block that is ready and willing to work hard for a party that is serious about addressing their very real, and very pressing needs.
links: Young Workers: A Lost Decade