Gillian B. White at The Atlantic writes—The False Stereotypes About Millennials Who Live at Home:
It’s easy to make fun of Millennials. They’ve been labeled spoiled, entitled, andlazy, and the fact that so many of them—nearly one in three, according to a recent Pew Research Center report—live at home with their parents only fuels the portrayal of the generation as a bunch of bratty kids.
But while it’s easy to hurl insults at 20-somethings (and 30-somethings) still crashing with their parents, the image of a spoiled upper-middle class adult spending all day on the couch playing video games is pretty far from the reality of most Millennials who wind up back home.
In fact, the very same data from Pew’s recent report doesn’t support that portrayal. Instead, the Millennials who are most likely to wind up living with their relatives are those who come from already marginalized groups that are plagued with low employment, low incomes, and low prospects for moving up the economic ladder. Millennials who live at home are also more likely to be minorities, more likely to be unemployed, and less likely to have a college degree. Living at home is particularly understandable for those who started school and took out loans, but didn’t finish their bachelor’s degree. These Millennials shoulder the burden of student-loan debt without the added benefits of increased job prospects, which can make living with a parent the most viable option.
For as much flack as Millennials get, there are a lot of economic reasons that the complaints some of them have are justified. According to 2014 data from the Census Bureau, median earnings for young adults who were working full-time were only about $34,000 for Millennials. That’s less than what their parents would’ve made in the 1980s, after adjusting for inflation. And that’s for Millennials who have found full-time work. According to Census data, only 65 percent of Millennials were employed as of 2014, compared to about 70 percent in the three decades prior. Those figures may help explain why nearly 20 percent of Millennials have wound up living in poverty—that’s more than five percentage points higher than the poverty rate of young adults in 1980—despite being the most educated cohort of young people in history.
Still, it’s not all about the economy.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Yes, Let's All Talk More About Iraq:
Despite his constant assertions of his military expertise, when speaking this week McCain once again proved ignorant of the most basic facts of the war he so avidly supports. He said that we have "drawn down to pre-surge levels": we most pointedly have not, causing the McCain campaign to angrily talk about "nitpicking" the difference between "verb tenses" -- like, say, past, present, future, and imaginary pluperfect. Because McCain wasn't badly misinformed, they assert, he was just talking about the future as if it were the present, or something.
He also claimed places like Mosul are "quiet" -- wrong. The latest suicide bombing was a mere day beforehand.
So when McCain said, in the same breath as those two fabrications that the Iraq War is "succeeding", it only called more attention to the bizarre and misinformed assertions he was using to justify that claim.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: We were off for Memorial Day last year, too, so for today’s rerun we jump back 6 months, instead, to a time when very many crazy nuts were running for president as Republicans, another mass shooting had just happened & people were having GunFAILs all the time.
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