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Dec. 27, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:07
3942 A Third of American Millennials Live with Their Parents!
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It's kind of a terrible thing that's occurring in the West at the moment.
There is this failure to launch, which is really in many places nowhere to land, and there is a continual bleeding off of the saved resources of the boomer generation.
Boomer generation is the wealthiest generation in human history in the West and they kind of slept by the wayside as the giant tank of statism and expanded government and the military industrial complex ran roughshod over the former freedoms fought for so hard throughout the 17th 18th 19th and early to mid 20th century And there is this kind of blowback right now and it's sort of like you have a neighbor like you get up you go hard to work and your neighbor just you know gets up late has some margaritas by his pool and watches and theorizes about the various cloud formations and what they mean relative to his Laziness is opium-soaked to dreams,
and you sit there saying, well, that's kind of annoying.
Why the hell am I getting up and going to work?
And, you know, if the guy didn't win the lottery, in general, what happens is people are bleeding off their savings, right?
You work hard, you save money, and then what happens is you bleed off your savings, which is a brutal process.
Because it looks like you have wealth when you, well, don't have wealth.
And this is what's really happening for the boomer generation.
There are a number of things that are happening that are allowing the boomers to pretend that they're still wealth.
Of course, there are massive government debts, unfunded liabilities.
And this continual focus on transferring money from the young to the old and from men to women.
The old tend to spend more because they have health care issues and they tend to travel more.
So they tend to stimulate the economy through that kind of spending.
And I mean, if you go to the mall and you look at the ratio, Of stores focused on women versus stores focused on men.
There's barely a place to park the man while the woman goes shopping in this mad spree of, I don't even know why these things exist, but they do.
And the consumer economy is vastly women.
Women make 80 to 90% of household decisions with regards to spending.
And women focus on housing and bigger houses and more houses.
I guess a man's job is his penis and a woman's home is a vagina, and it's important to keep them fresh.
And this reality of how all of this comes about is pretty important to understand.
One of the reasons why there's all of this mass immigration fueled by welfare is that when immigrants come into a country, particularly if they're poor, and you give them welfare, then what happens is they drive up the price of housing.
And when they drive up the price of housing, that gives the boomers a sense of artificial value, artificial money.
Houses are consumable, right?
There's stuff you invest in that grows in value and there's stuff that you invest in that's supposed to decline in value.
And as automation and efficiency means that we need fewer and fewer laborers, then you have a demographic decline.
Demographic decline is perfectly fine.
Nothing wrong with it at all.
Japan, you say, oh, well, Japan is not having enough kids.
It's like, well, first of all, they have a giant welfare state and their zombie economy is horrendous.
I mean, their debt to GDP ratio is well north of 200%.
I used to think that South Asians were good at math.
But anyway, So what?
Just automate. But here's the problem.
When you have fewer children around and more automation, well, robots don't need homes to live in.
And so what happens is, The value of housing begins to decline.
There are just fewer people looking for houses.
And when the value of housing begins to decline, then the nest egg, which a lot of boomers thought was going to carry them through retirement, tends to decline as well.
And so, you know, keeping house prices up.
And now it's not like the immediate migrants or immigrants are immediately competing with boomers, but what happens is they're competing with people for often the cheapest housing.
and there's a lot of zoning which means houses can't be built so they're competing with people for the cheapest housing and what that means is that it tends to flow upwards right so the people who used to like the natives who used to be able to afford the cheapest houses now can't so they I guess have to either compete with them or they they have to move up and plus you know when the migrants move in the natives generally move out and so it just drives up it's an escalating cost right so let's say there's five tiers of housing and there's massive competition for the lowest tier that pushes people up into the next tier which pushes those people up into the next tier and it kind of flows uphill as far as value goes And maintaining the value of real estate has been one of the central,
if not planned, certainly side effects of this low-interest phenomenon.
Governments need low interest rates to stimulate the economy in the here and now.
Governments don't care about the economy in five years or ten years, for the most part.
I think Trump accepted, but governments care about the economy now.
And if you transfer a lot of money to people on welfare, then they will spend it.
They're not saving it much.
They're not investing it much.
They're spending it, which stimulates economic activity.
in the here and now but of course at the expense of economic activity in the future and when you transfer money from men to women which used to happen through marriage and now happens through divorce courts and alimony and child support and the welfare state funding single motherhood what happens is women love to spend money in the here and now and aren't quite as good on average at the old saving thing and that means you get a boost of economic activity now but at the cost of improved worker productivity in the future and this of course is a big A big problem.
Capital improvements aren't made.
Business-to-business transactions decline.
And of course, when interest rates are low, it stimulates spending in the here and now and disincentivizes or in fact penalizes savings.
The only places where savings are not penalized these days seems to be Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
So this focus on stimulating economic activity in the here and now is a foundational aspect of late decaying statism.
And it is eating your seed crop, not caring about the future.
Now, what's happening though, I mean, just my sort of personal history perspective, maybe even bias for those who want to know, is I got my first job when I was 10.
I was painting plaques for the Silver Jubilee in 1977.
In England and then when we moved to Canada I got a job fairly quickly at a bookstore.
I used to put the New York Times and other newspapers together on Sunday mornings and then I would do all of that stuff around the bookstore and I worked as a cleaner for offices.
I had waitering jobs.
I worked Lord, what did I do?
I gardened for people.
I took someone's grandmother around when they were too busy.
I cleaned using, I guess, cloths, right?
You clean the pet hair off the carpets of people's houses.
Anyway, just a whole bunch of jobs.
I've been sort of paying my own bills with help from Sibling and roommates since I was about 15 or so and so I kind of got started early in the whole work thing and this delay of work which again teenagers why can't they find jobs because massive numbers of third-world immigrants are pouring in and what that meant of course the minimum wage is going up which means teenagers stuck in terrible terrible Oh, I worked at a convenience store as well.
I was really keen on this girl, and the first time I saw her outside of school, I was with a knife scraping gum off the floor of a convenience store.
Not a very alpha position when you think about it.
Hey, when I get the gum out from under my nails, want to grab a coffee?
So, I mean, what is it?
Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Anyway, So, when you get massive competition of third world immigrants for low rent jobs, teenagers can't get jobs, when you raise the minimum wage, jobs get eliminated or automated or whatever.
And so it's pretty terrible in terms of opportunities.
Like I say, oh, I just went out and got jobs, and people are responding, and rightly so, that it was a lot easier to get jobs in the 70s and the 80s than it is now.
And I understand that.
Schools were slightly better, and the massive amount of competition wasn't there.
And that's pretty tough. It's pretty tough, right?
So now what's happening is instead of the net impact of terrible education, of underemployment, of massive depression of wages through massive third world immigration and the raising of minimum wages actually ends up depressing our wages because those areas where there are minimum wages You'd end up tending to hire fewer people,
which puts people into jobs like unpaid apprenticeship jobs or unpaid intern jobs and so on.
Or they end up going into areas where minimum wage doesn't apply.
I mean, when I was a waiter the minimum wage was far lower because you got tips.
And of course people just leave and families end up moving to where there's more economic opportunity, which drives down the wages in those areas where the minimum wage is lower.
So anyway, what's happening is there's a huge amount of capital was built up in the boomers and their capital is now being bled away rather than saved or invested or used for the future.
So what's happening now, like when I was a kid, I mean, if you were living at home after your teens and into your 20s, it was like, what the hell's wrong with you, right?
But now, the 20-somethings who go back to live at home, You would do it as a temporary embarrassing measure.
Like when I was a kid, there were the people who worked and then there was like the bungalows out back of where I lived in London where the people who didn't work lived.
You know, the guys hanging around drinking Guinness and their wife beaters.
And it was shameful.
You didn't associate with those people.
You didn't deal with those people.
This is back before welfare completely eroded social shaming for being dependent on charity, which used to be enforced privately through churches and other institutions.
You had social pressure to get off charity because people didn't like having to pay for you.
Once the welfare state comes in, that social opprobrium vanishes in terms of its capacity to manage human relations and it all just decays.
So it used to be kind of embarrassing.
Women wouldn't go out with you.
Mama's boy. But now, this is a new study that came out recently from the Census Bureau.
In the States, about a third of all millennials live at home with their parents, and one-fourth of them aren't even enrolled in school or trying to find a job.
That's really quite something.
Now, if costs are being saved somewhere, costs are being spent elsewhere, and this is sort of the, you know, the...
The boomers accumulated a lot of wealth and part of this was by not opposing the state and having a lot of social programs and other kind of benefits paid for by debt which meant you didn't have your taxes raised to pay for what you wanted.
And so what happens is when you don't oppose the state and the government grows and overflows the economy and destroys opportunity then your kids don't have anywhere to go economically so they come back and move it home.
And so this is really undermining, if not downright, eviscerating the retirement savings of the boomer units to about a quarter million, a quarter million, sorry, quarter million dollars.
So this is from the survey.
Parents could miss out on almost a quarter million dollars in retirement savings by paying their adult kids expenses.
A parent's retirement savings could be $227,000 higher if they chose to save the money that would otherwise go to their child's living expenses and Tuition.
So parents paying college costs could be missing out on almost $80,000 in retirement savings.
More than a quarter of parents of children under 18, sorry, 18 and older, 28%, are paying or have paid for their adult children's tuition or student loans.
The average parent takes out $21,000 in loans for their child's college education.
But the hit to retirement savings has almost quadrupled that amount.
Most adult children are living with their parents for more than a year after they turn 18.
Almost 3 in 5 parents with kids 18 and older have had adult children living with them for more than a year.
Over 1 in 5 have had adult children living with them for more than 5 years.
On average, these parents say the longest period of time they've had their adult children living with them is 4.5 years.
Parents expect their kids to help them financially during retirement.
Almost a quarter of parents saving for retirement 23% expect their children to provide financial support for them after they retire.
Millennial parents are most likely to say this, 44 versus 25% of Gen X parents and 5% of baby boomer parents, despite saving more than parents from other generations.
So where is this money going?
So, you know, it's one thing to have your kid living at home and it's like, okay, well, we're paying for heat anyway.
We have a spare room. It's not a big deal.
But many parents of children 18 or older are paying or have paid for their adult children's basic living costs, including groceries, health insurance, and rent or housing outside the family home.
Some parents are also covering or have covered their adult child's cell phone bill and car insurance.
But it's important for parents, especially those who are behind in saving for retirement, to note that those same dollars could significantly grow their nest eggs over time.
In addition to these living costs, some parents of children 18 and older are paying for or have paid for other expenses such as clothing, entertainment, and allowance.
10% or a car loan, 10%.
Really quite astonishing.
And how long is this going to go on?
Well, again, one in five households surveyed, said their adult children lived with them for more than half a decade.
Just astonishing.
So what's going to happen?
Well, of course, the children are losing essential life skills.
The children are living in this sort of amniotic sack of boomer Accumulation of wealth and what happens?
You know, I mean, I've been a hiring manager.
I must have interviewed 1000 people.
I've hired 100 or 200 people over the course of my career.
If I see someone who graduated from college a year or two ago or three and hasn't really done anything, I'm sorry, like, life is momentum.
You know the old saying, if you want to get something done, give it to the busy person?
Well, that's the way it is when you're a hiring manager, I think.
And I've talked to other hiring managers as well.
It's a big deal. If I see somebody who's lost momentum in life, I assume that they've not got a lot of drive, not got a lot of ambition.
I mean, when you're young, you should be, you know, cloying at the future, like somebody trying to dig their way out of an avalanche.
I mean, you should just be cloying and biting and grabbing to get at your future, stopping at nothing, to build a world for yourself.
And yeah, okay, if you're a white male, probably you're not going to be hired by many places because of...
The racism of diversity and affirmative action, but you then can be an entrepreneur.
You can start your own thing.
You can challenge yourself.
You know, if you're not working, looking for work should be your full-time job.
You get up, you sit down at your computer, you make your phone calls, you work your contacts, you go out and meet people, you go to job fairs, just be an eight-hour job.
It's just the way it should be.
And people who've lost that kind of momentum, it's really hard.
Inertia, when inertia sets in, It's a big problem because then what happens is you're kind of used to a life of potentate or Mandarin or Sultan-like lassitude and it's really, really hard to get in motion.
So, you know, that temptation of the lazy slide is definitely there and the temptation to have mommy and daddy pay the bills into your 20s is definitely there.
I understand it. But it is a temptation.
I would strongly suggest that you resist at all costs.
You know, if you absolutely need a place to crash, sure.
But the welfare state, so to speak, of biology, I mean, it's voluntary.
It's not immoral or anything like that.
But things can be unproductive without being immoral.
You know, keep working to get your job skills up.
Keep working to keep your contacts up.
Keep having a job, even if it's not that great.
Because getting a job when you have a job is a whole lot easier.
So as a society as a whole, of course, we have this giant problem, which is that we are stealing from the future to feed the bribery and corruption of the present.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be that way.
We can really recognize that this kind of predation can't last, make decisions more appropriately, and do better as a society.
Thanks so much for listening and watching.
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