More people are living with family amid high unemployment rates and a slow economy, but while the phenomenon is keeping the poverty rate lower, it has wider negative economic consequences.
In a presentation as part of its wider report on income, poverty and health insurance, the Census Bureau noted a big jump in the number of individuals and families doubling up. Census says 69.2 million, or 30%, were doubled-up in 2011, up from 61.7 million adults, or 27.7%, in 2007. “Doubled-up” households include at least one person 18 or older who isn’t enrolled in school and isn’t the householder, spouse or cohabiting partner of the householder.
Opening up one’s home, one’s intimate personal space, is appropriate when an adult child or other family member is in extremis.
And certainly we are in difficult financial times producing such extremis.
However, adult children were not leaving home and striking out on their own, as part of the traditional maturation process, well before the current difficult times.
Those immature young adults may never mature. And sadly, when they live at home, they saddle their parents with the problems that they create for themselves and others through their immaturity.
Elves please delete “This retarded maturation” from my comment number #1.
A lot of it is the debt. If you have 100,000 in college loans it is not possible to pay for rent and utilities. You have to live at home until you pay off the loan.
When the boomers left college, their college loans were modest or nonexistant, health insurance costs were low, and it was possible to live independantly with an entry level job.
The current generation has far higher fixed costs in debts and have far less in the way of job options than we did. A large part of the reason for this is that the voting age public elected to maintain Social security and other entitlement payments, in the face of declining demographics of workers to support it, and chose to “pay” for these current expenditures by ceasing the funding of education by grants, and going to a loan system instead.
I am not a fan of the millenials who are indeed as unattractive as most adolescents can be. However it is the Boomers who never matured not the Millenials. The Millenials are still maturing. Hopefully they will get there. Eventually. The boomers, however, manifestly will never mature. If you are old enough to retire and you are still blaming the folks you robbed, maturity is unlikely to come to you.
Further, however annoying Millenials at home can be, it is the Boomers who have saddled their children with problems they created. This entire financial crisis was obvious in the early 1980s. It was known then that the Boomers (and the generation above them) were not saving enough for retirement and were going on vacations and buying fancy cars instead. I said then that we and our children would be robbed in order to pay for the retirement for the folks who went on vacations. It has come true.
Clueless (#2.),
I am a pre-Boomer who was born in 1940. The Boomers were about 6 to 15 years behind me.
I am not happy about many traits of the Boomer generation either.
I fought in South Vietnam to protect South Vietnamese nationalists against the imperialism of the international communists who were using North Vietnam and Vietnamese quislings as a base of operations to complete the consolidation of their conquest of Vietnam.
I watched the adolescent behavior of the Boomer anti-war movement before and after the Vietnam War. They led our country into outright betrayal of an ally and many, maybe most, of them are proud of that betrayal.
Their morals are and were, for most of them, an abomination and those morals, or their lack of morals, are a primary cause of the major societal problems that our society is suffering today.
I don’t know if this is an issue of maturity or mere necessity. Many young people I know fresh out of college could never afford to live alone with the amount of debt they have, factored with the low paying jobs they are getting.
I seem to recall reading awhile back that since the 1970s, average college costs have gone up 700 percent. We would be lucky if income has gone up even half that since then. This means that college is becoming less and less of a good investment every year as college costs skyrocket, while incomes remain stagnant. Add this to high unemployment and even higher underemployment, and the situation isn’t too good for the younger generation of job seekers.
As Clueless mentioned, the Boomers have ensured that they are protected by expensive entitlements. Not that I blame them, but they have been pretty organized and pretty irresponsible. This could be why a large number of young people support Ron Paul. They realize that the current out of control government spending and entitlements, and the devaluation of the dollar, will ultimately punish future generations so the boomers can live it up.
As a boomer, who served in Vietnam and has worked all his life and continues to do so and will probably until I die, I say this to all of you who love to cast all of this on us. We didn’t start the VN war, the Greatest Generation did that (and then they didn’t allow us to fight it and win it). We didn’t pass the Great Society legislation that has cost so much during the last 5 decades. The Greatest Generation did that. Yes, the free love era began with some of us – but I have seen no subsequent generation attempt to reign that morality in or promote old time morals. In fact, loose morality has expanded since Boomers became old and more conservative.
The problem in a nut shell is that deductions of income taxes were withdrawn so much over the last 5 decades that Boomers and others who were working basically had to put all their money into their houses (only other real deductions are charitable and other taxes we pay) and take out big loans (since the interest was the other big deduction). That was the tax policy anyone working (especially Boomers) was driven to, the idea being that when retirement came, Boomers could sell their houses and use the equity income, along with any pension one might have, plus social security – which Boomers have paid into forever and a day, much more than any generation before us – and, plus, as of mid-90s a 401K, all for retirement income. Now the housing bubble has shot that plan down, thanks, again, to social programs interfering with normal economic way of living (i.e. bad loans required to be made for social reasons required by Federal gov’t, being bundled with good loans and sold as securities until the scheme was revealed to the world). And Congress, in order to pay for the Great Society programs, “borrowed” from SS Trust Fund and set up this mandatory Medicare thing, which because Boomers are so numerous (being post WWII babies) turned the pyramid for SS and Medicare upside down. You are criticizing Boomers for wanting to use social security and blaming us for its lack of funds, when we are not asking more than what has been given to all generations of the past, and we have paid in much more than any generation in the past. You criticize Boomers for the cost they put on Medicare, but we are forced by law to use it, when many of us would prefer not to. I could raise other factors in defense of Boomers (like the cost of living during the years when they were trying to buy homes – huge inflation and 14-20% mortgage rates in 70s; poor public education systems, requiring private schools for their children – how do you save for retirement with over 20 years of those kinds of payments).
But my point is that you can’t just say Boomers are the cause of all of the present day problems because the Boomer hippies were immoral in the late 60s and early 70s and because the Boomers haven’t saved enough for retirement. Many factors, well beyond Boomers’ control, have contributed to this. Boomers have not been any more selfish or any less charitable than any generation before or after. There are bad actors and good actors in every generation. (You wouldn’t want me to say that the lack of a decent work ethic of all generations who came after Boomers is the real cause of the decline in America’s economy, but a good argument can be made that such is true.)
I do not know how I would go about proving this, but I suspect that our current plight has come from two sources – a government which thought it could do everything, and made many decisions that were short-term fixes for problems but which would bring about long-term problems – because elected officials wanted to be re-elected and the long-term solution would be too painful and cost them votes. Secondly, businesses that, for any number of reasons (including the structure of the tax laws) made similar decisions, seeking the greatest profit for a quarter, even if over time that decision would be bad for the company.
We also have a populace that tends to think that boom times are normal and will not be happy unless there is a boom on. That sets up politicians to make short-term fixes. And on and on it goes…