A generation accustomed to financial challenges is dealing with their recession fears through wry TikToks and by swapping cost-cutting suggestions online.
Millennials are worried they are about to experience a “once-in-a-lifetime” recession. Again.
Dire economic downturns are supposed to be rare, but millennials — defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1981 and 1996 — have already had several recessions during formative stages of their lives, from the dot-com bubble burst when most were children, to the Great Recession as they entered the workforce after college, to the Covid-19 pandemic when they were trying to settle into their careers.
Once dubbed the “unluckiest generation,” millennials have postponed major milestones during past recessions. A significant slice of them graduated college between 2007 and 2009 and struggled to find jobs, which led them to delay buying homes, getting married, and making major purchases, such as cars. Then, after the pandemic led to another sharp recession, some millennials, contending with student loans and rising costs of living, decided to rethink having kids.
Millennials were fucked repeatedly by the economy and still are and now other generations. But nah let’s let these boomer assholes just destroy everything and turn the country into a giant trailer park of inbreds.
This is such an easy problem to solve.
Let them repeal Medicare.
Within a month either half the boomers will be dying, OR, you’ll have an army of 5 million boomers charging the white house to gadaffi the orange fuck unless he gives them back their viagra.
Or.Suspend social security, if you want to guarantee the latter.
Those outcomes are the explicit reasons they HAVEN’T repealed those programs in the past. Gutted them several times over, turned them into money piles for The Rich, yes, but never, EVER actually tried to repeal them. They’ve campaigned against these programs for DECADES, screaming about how awful they are, how they’ll get rid of them and then everyone will be wealthy, for YEARS!!!
But they haven’t. As a political scapegoat, they’re too damn useful; they consistently get a major voting bloc motivated and just plain angry enough to head to the polls and knowingly, openly vote against their own interests. But more than that, they know that those same people, the ones frothing at the mouth against the immigrant, the queer, and the minority, are the ones who will suffer most should these programs fail, leading them to direct their anger at those who caused it.
And so, the programs persist, for should they actually fail, heads will roll…
Which is exactly why we should encourage them to grab that third rail with both hands and not let go.
I want to see a president face a real-time, physical referendum on their performance.