Youth in revolt might look toward Bernie Sanders and a socialist hope, but the anger should be directed at older Americans, not capitalism.
Students have been enraged by bad cafeteria food, free speech that ignores their calls for sensitivity and trigger warnings, and a lack of funding for their favored projects. Intergenerational wealth transfers, however, have gone unnoticed, as Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post.
Youth issues, such as rising college costs, higher unemployment rates than older Americans, and uncertainty in health care, have all been ignored for the benefit of the Baby Boomers.
“If students want to feel like victims, there are very real and underappreciated ways they’re being economically victimized. Older generations have racked up trillions in debt and stuck young people with the bill … One of the largest ongoing sources of spending involves huge age-specific transfers: Our politicians are paying off older, higher-voter-turnout Americans in the form of generous benefits that those older people have not paid for and never will. Which means the tab will need to be picked up by someone else — i.e., someone younger,” Rampell wrote.
Parents have started to eat their children.
Millennials have a hard time finding a foothold because their meager incomes are subsidizing wealthier generations. That doesn’t seem like something that will change soon, either. Older generations vote in such large numbers, and have politicians pandering to them so incessantly, that millennials have been apathetic to voting, and have yet to coalesce into an aware voting bloc. Nor, it seems, will they.
They’ve heeded the siren call of socialism, and maybe the reasons go deeper than an ignorance of the realities of it. The United States already has age-preferential socialism. Their parents and grandparents have seized the political means of production to redistribute wealth. As entitlements and debt pile up, millennials have focused on the microaggressions of college administrators as they ignore the macroaggressions of their elders.
