Pew Research Center reported this week that millennials are far more likely to get their news from social media than from local TV.
Perhaps that’s because we’re carefully curating our news sources, sick of the traditional media constantly berating our generation as mooching, lazy, self-absorbed, dependent and unfocused.
Some are subtle. The New York Times ran an article this week suggesting we need “fun banking” to navigate complex personal finances and a Fortune op-ed offered tips for employers to “engage” our supposedly disconnected generation in the workplace.
Some aren’t so subtle. Fox’s Charles Gasparino called millennials “[expletive] morons” and proclaimed “most millennials are losers.”
Are we just being thin-skinned? No — and here’s why.
The facts don’t support the millennials-as-moochers narrative you hear so often. On the contrary: Aging lawmakers and their Boomer and Gen-X constituencies have strangled economic opportunities for America’s young, even as they craft a future where we prodigiously subsidize them.
True, roughly two-thirds of youngsters with bachelor’s degrees also have massive student-loan debt, around $27,000 on average; 30-year-olds are as likely to live with their parents as to own a house; the unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds is 7.9 percent and, adjusted for labor-force participation, it jumps to 13.8 percent.
But instead of using these statistics to bludgeon down-and-out millennials, older generations should reflect on how they’ve created barriers to success for America’s young.
It begins in the classroom. Under the academic stewardship of Boomers and Gen-Xers, the K-12 system has concentrated on providing iron-clad job security for aging teachers, neglecting the interests of millennial students.
Our colleges and universities are no different, with old-school hippie professors focusing more on the parsing of micro-aggressions than the acquisition of marketable skills.
Politicians elected and regulators hired before millennials reached adulthood enacted the disastrous policies that led to the Great Recession.
Those same generations shoved through big-spending economic “fixes” that racked up the national debt, increased the regulatory burden on the private sector and ultimately hindered job creation.
Our critics are quick to blame millennials for big government. After all, they argue, didn’t we overwhelmingly support Barack Obama? And we did — but so did they. Even if half of millennials had voted Republican in 2008, older generations gave Obama a wide-enough margin that he could’ve won anyway.
Under the Obama administration, we’ve seen the most elderly Congresses in history. That Boomer influence explains much about why current policies amount to massive generational theft, draining millennial finances for decades to come.
Start with ObamaCare. It forces millennials to subsidize health care for older Americans, pilfering from our bite-sized paychecks and dwarfed bank accounts.
Our soaring premiums — up as much as 97 percent in the non-group market for 27-year-old men, Forbes reports — prove how huge a burden we shoulder for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
First lady Michelle Obama has even used millennial-bashing to try to bully us into signing up for this bum deal. “The truth is, young people are knuckleheads,” she told Jimmy Fallon last year, in a last-ditch attempt to shame us into enrollment.
Our fossilizing forefathers’ entitlement mentality extends far beyond ObamaCare.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — the cost projections for all these programs chart steeply upward. Aged armchair critics will be long dead and buried by the time the bill comes due, leaving thankless millennials to pick up the tab.
Add in unfunded pension liabilities and our financial futures grow even dimmer.
According to some estimates, the average American taxpayer owes more than $15,000 toward public-workers’ benefits.
Those same pundits eager to rip on millennials remain strangely silent about how their generation has pulled off this massive financial heist.
They owe us an explanation for that — or better yet, a thank-you note.
Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a fellow for the Franklin Center and Independent Women’s Forum.