As Conservatism implodes, its dwindling adherents seem gripped by a strange, selective amnesia. these otherwise intelligent and decent people suffer astonishing short-term memory lapses regarding politics.
For example, you can point out that student loans are by nature usurious and therefore impose no moral obligation of repayment. Conservatives will nod and agree that a just society would take steps to make victims of fraud whole. But when democrats actually proposed student debt forgiveness, those same Conservatives rushed on stage to don their devil horns.
It’s no secret that members of the younger generations, especially Gen Y and the Millennials, lag far behind their parents’ financial attainment at the same age. This brewing economic crisis threatens Baby Boomers housing, pensions, and entitlements. Aging Boomers are having trouble finding buyers for their large, single-family homes because younger folks aren’t earning enough to have families, much less buy houses.
That’s just in the short to mid-term. In the long run, the economic drain of having multiple generations whose standards of living fall far below their parents’ invites a disaster to make the 2008 crash look like a picnic.
Understanding the problem gives you the solution. Why are Millennials, Ys, and even Xers economically underperforming?
Is everybody younger than the Boomers possessed of weak character and a shiftless work ethic?
That’s not what the data show. Ys and Millennials forfeit more vacation days and work more overtime than Boomers. Most of the differences in generational work habits arise from members of those generations being at different stages in their lives with correspondingly different goals.
Is the earnings discrepancy caused by Millennials choosing majors like interpretive dance and underwater basket weaving instead of tried and true STEM fields?
Again, no. Only 26% of STEM graduates actually work in their field of study, STEM jobs only account for 6% of the US work force to begin with, and the influx of H1 visa workers further increase competition and depress wages. Telling Millennials to get STEM degrees is like telling everyone on the Titanic to cram into a single leaky lifeboat.
A major cause of younger generations’ impoverishment, besides the aforementioned insane immigration policies, is the student loan racket.
US student loan debt currently stands at $1.5 trillion. Much of that debt is unrepayable. We’re not just talking Starbucks baristas with studies degrees. There are doctors and lawyers pulling down six figure salaries barred from buying homes because their minimum monthly payments exceed mortgage payments for even modest houses. These kids would have to become millionaires to pay down the principal.
Massive fiscals disasters like the student loan crisis don’t happen for no reason. Those who chalk the entirety of the problem up to Millennial students being too lazy and stupid to research lucrative majors or the perils of usury are blithely ignoring another problem. The people they glibly assume are too dumb to stave off personal financial ruin will soon be in charge of the nation’s finances.
The truth that certain quarters don’t want to admit is that these kids were conned. A functioning society relies upon the young trusting their parents, educators, authorities, and elders in general. When absolutely all of those authorities give their charges wrong information and urge them to take actions that later prove ruinous, the correct conclusion is that the students were defrauded.
Based on many of my interactions with self-professed Christian Conservatives, a shocking number of them just don’t get this. When you confront them with the reality that these aren’t lazy punks deferring their job searches to play Fortnite, but young professionals busting their humps just to tread water, it just doesn’t penetrate. The usual excuses they give for ignoring their fellow Americans’ suffering are bromides about harming the free market, paeans to individual responsibility, and even snide, “I got mine!” vitriol.
It’s that thinly veiled contempt for the young and the poor that outs this cult as thralls of Mammon. Christ exhorted his followers to sell half their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. He endorsed fraudsters repaying those they defrauded fourfold. Christians are to exercise a fundamental preference for the poor–especially the poor among their own countrymen.
You cannot sneer at someone who is impoverished–even by his own bad choices–and at the same time say that Jesus is Lord with any shred of integrity.
Indeed, defrauding workers is one of four sins, along with murder, sodomy, and mistreating widows and orphans, that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.
What sets the Mammon Mob apart from political ideology and into the cult category is its adherents’ elevation of practical political matters to articles of faith. Student debt relief is a practical economic measure necessary to stave off catastrophe. It’s also popular with the electorate. Republicans know this fact, which is why they accused the Biden administration of buying votes by declaring its ill-fated debt amnesty.
And according to GOP talking heads forbidden by their masters to acknowledge fraud, it worked. So you’d think Republicans would embrace student loan forgiveness out of mercenary self-interest. Instead, they sued to block usury victims from being made whole.
Millennials are suffering the most under the student debt burden, and they’re about to become the largest voting bloc in the country. Whichever party convincingly offers to break their debt shackles is guaranteed to dominate at the polls. Yet when I’ve pointed out that the GOP is foolish for ignoring this issue, Conservatives have recoiled like vampires splashed with holy water because they say student debt forgiveness violates their beliefs.
It’s the exact same aversion to winning and wielding political power you see from Republicans on the immigration issue. And once again, they invent a false principle out of inaction instead of acting on the genuine moral principles of justice, prudence, and compassion.
Politics is the art of the possible. It is about winning elections and then using that political power to help your friends and crush your enemies. The Death Cult gets this. The Mammon Mob helps them by refusing to use their last scraps of power even to help themselves.
Conservatives handed this winning issue to the Death Cult, and so let them keep leading Millennials into socialism. And as go the Millennials, so goes America.
“Do you have a better alternative?” I hear some of you ask.
If you want solutions, see this post.
“Goes beyond analysis into action”
On the way home from work I happened to have the Joe Pags show on as I was flipping through stations. He was discussing various stuff about Ye and in particular his alleged anti-semitism. As part of the discussion he claimed bafflement at how there would ever be any conflict between Jews and Christians to begin with.
A caller called in and starting talking about that, beginning with the observation that while some Jews supported Jesus, that the Jewish church leaders handed him over to die. Joe Pags immediately interrupted the caller and said that no such thing ever happened in the Bible. The caller was rather dumbfounded saying that it’s a pretty clear part of the passion narrative, with Pags giving dumb responses like “But if Jesus was Jewish, how could he have been killed by Jews” (even after the caller repeatedly made clear that he was specifically referring to the temple authorities.) The conversation didn’t proceed past that point because Pags treated the whole idea like a conspiracy theory.
More related to the topic of this thread, I have had many conversations with Boomers where it became clear that they did not think that Usury was a sin and were completely unaware against any pronouncements against Usury in the Bible or later Christian tradition.
Put this all together with the usual Boomer reaction to their kids marrying outside the Church (“but if it’s not in a Church it won’t look like proper wedding”) and I’m convinced that the majority of them were functionally pagans throughout their lives.
“I’m convinced that the majority of them were functionally pagans throughout their lives.”
That’s why I don’t let fedora-tipper FUD memes like “Christians will soon be a minority in the West!” rattle me. The truth is that most Westerners have been de factor pagans since at least the 1970s. What’s happening now is that being Christian is starting to exact a cost, so the posers are heading for the exits, thereby making the Church holier.
“The truth that certain quarters don’t want to admit is that these kids were conned. ”
^^^^This^^^^ An agreement made under false pretenses is not morally valid.
That’s the go-to response when someone says, “Even if a loan is usurious, that only means the interest should be forgiven.”
For all his multitudinous faults, Mike Rowe is probably the only reason I was not saddled down with huge amounts of student debt like most of the rest of both of the generations I straddle the boundary between (Y and Millennial.) I couldn’t at the time take up a trade, but he was the only one I ever heard back in the Oughts who was saying both “colleges are too expensive” and “therefore, most people shouldn’t go to college.”
Lots of BoomerCons I knew/knew of said the first, but replaced the latter with “but it is worth it!” And Pinko Boomer replaced Rowe’s second claim with “so it should be free!”
Making hard work look attractive while covered in crud was quite a feat, even with his humor.
That’s why Mike Rowe still has my respect to this day.
the Census link seems to be broken. Searching for STEM on the website, I found this:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/does-majoring-in-stem-lead-to-stem-job-after-graduation.html
Among the 50 million employed college graduates ages 25 to 64 in 2019, 37% reported a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering but only 14% worked in a STEM occupation, according to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.
This translates into less than a third (28%) of STEM-educated workers actually working in a STEM job.
Not much of a shift in 5 years.
Thanks for the heads up.