Millennials Need Jobs

As colleges’ new graduates attempt to enter the workforce this summer, their chances of finding a job in a down-turned economy seem bleak, especially for young men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average unemployment in America was 8.9 percent for the month of April, but unemployment among youth between 20 and 24 years old averages 14.7 percent.

More disturbingly, a full 17.5 percent of men in this age group are unemployed. Young women ages 20 to 24 do much better, with six percent less unemployment (11.5 percent) for their age, although young women still have above average joblessness. (The unemployment gender gap for this age group was 1.6 percent in April 2007).

A new coalition called 80 Million Strong for Young American Jobs is concerned about this disproportionate unemployment among America’s youth. The coalition, launched on May 7, will attempt to focus the Millennial Generation’s political activism around a singular goal: creating jobs for themselves. Matthew Segal, Executive Director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) said at the coalition launch that “our coalition’s goals are to convene a summit of diverse young Americans who can a) draw awareness to the problem, b) propose solutions, and [c)] package these solutions and recommendations into federal legislation.”

According to Segal, the coalition is “focused on recruiting a diverse sampling of young ideas to create economic opportunity for young Americans. We plan on inviting young conservatives to attend our July event—and will also invite conservative senators (Dick Lugar and Orrin Hatch) to speak.” For Segal, a possible avenue to bipartisan cooperation could be in “creating new career opportunities for young Americans in vital national defense fields—such as cyber security, intelligence, etc.”

“Since young Americans are among the most technologically savvy of any demographic, we are quite qualified for these jobs—and we see a homeland security focus as a possible asset for recruiting bipartisan support,” he wrote.

Perhaps foreshadowing the likelihood that such a “jobs-creating” bill would entail greater federal deficit spending, all three of the signature speakers reacted against fiscal responsibility arguments or suggested new government spending.

(E.D. Western Europe’s perpetual unemployment, higher than that of the U.S., stems from such attitudes).
Chris Hayes, editor of The Nation, argued that a pushback to the argument that the growing deficit is generational theft was that “it really hurts young people entering the workforce if we have a trillion-dollar output gap in the economy” and government spending helps fill that gap. He also argued that those condemning the debt often don’t actually care about the burden on their children. “A lot of people like to talk about the debt we’re passing onto our children—and there is reason to be worried about the debt—but the people who are saying that tend to be old people and they tend not to actually care that much at the end of the day about the debt that they’re going to pass onto their kids,” he argued.

Ethan Porter, associate editor of Democracy Journal, suggested a revival of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration.

Another leftist media star, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift said that “We are looking at an enormous pile of debt that’s being compiled on Capitol Hill, we are literally printing money and sucking up every available dollar, yuan and euro that we can around the globe and if you’re on the progressive side of the ideological divide you think of this as investments in the next generation, your generation, and investments is really just another word for spending but I call it good spending, smart spending and to make sure it’s good spending and smart spending you have to stay engaged” (emphasis added).

She continued, “If you’re to the right on that ideological divide, you might echo what John McCain says. He calls the deficit ‘generational theft’ and if the Republican party is going to rebuild itself, there is an opening for them because Americans are nervous about how much money we owe and how we’re gonna pay for everything and so if you happen to be on that side of the ideological divide there’s plenty room for you in [a] Republican party that doesn’t really have any national leaders of stature and we barely knew who Barack Obama was four years ago so, hey, there’s lots of room.”

For all her professed moderation, Clift’s website refers to the death of Terry Schiavo as a controversy caused by the fanatical religious right. “For the first time, the nation got a clear view of both the fanaticism gripping the religious right and the political power it could bring to bear even when the vast majority of the country disagreed with it,” states her web page advertisement for Two Weeks of Life. The book casts the death of Clift’s husband from cancer on a parallel narrative with Schiavo’s death by starvation, ordered by others.

Clift also remarked in April that President Obama’s forays into the private sector were necessary because of a “failure of capitalism” and argued that Obama is “trying to save capitalism.” “People are looking to Washington and to government for help and to argue ‘get government out of the way’ makes no sense in this political climate,” she argued.

Will the economy get better anytime soon? The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) offered tentative hope on May 11. According to March data, developed countries are still experiencing a strong decline in productivity, but at least for some nations the decline is beginning to moderate, suggesting that world economies could level off. “However France, Italy and the United Kingdom are showing tentative signs of, at least, a pause in the economic slowdown,” reports the OECD. “Weak though these signals are, they are present in the majority of the [composite leading indicator] CLI component series for these countries. In other major OECD economies the CLIs continue to point to deterioration in the business cycle, but at a decreasing rate.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.