203
Fewer young people are meeting these 5 milestones typically associated with adulthood
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
203 points (93.9% liked)
News
31674 readers
1883 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To put it In Perspective, in 1968. A person made about 6 grand a year houses were 12k. So twice the income. Now? Mean houses prices are around 400k. Income is around 66k.
There is no comparison. Today's kids are financially MUCH worse off than we genxers
Effectively, someone would have to be earning over a million dollars a year in literal wages (which virtually no one is) in order to have the equivalent buying power that someone earning a couple bucks an hour did in the 50s/60s. And that level of buying power was considered an appropriate wage for literal child workers…
And yet old folks complain “no one wants to work anymore”. Yeah, maybe thats because were grown adults with a tiny fraction of the buying power you had when you were 12 and bread cost a nickel
Who is upvoting this shitty math?
2/hr in the 60s is equivalent to 46k/yr today by CPI
Keeping it to half of median housing cost would mean we need ~150k/yr.
Where you pulling a million from?
Old folks don't complain and say that.
Conservatives do
Back when I was a wee lad growing uo in the mean fields of rural new england, the conservatives in power were loud and powerful. And older. Boomers and the their parents.
But they were also richer, and like any other rich powerful elitists, they blamed the poor people for their greed and unwillingness to pay
So of course old people were demonized for saying it was the kids not wanting to work. Wasn't. It was the elite.
There's more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age),
Buts its not old people its the musk and trump and Zuckerberg, etc..
That's why these people need distractions, culture wars , so they don't realize it's class warfare
This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don't become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there's also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that's another topic).
I'm reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.
You're young. You also can't read. Because I also said that's changing.
Now continue feeling good about not knowing what yoyr talking about.
Most Conservatives aren't wealthy. Go ahead. Look.
It probably wasn't clear, but I was agreeing with you but expanding on the point. Because the science says that there's no correlation between age and leftists becoming more conservative and never has been, but there absolutely is with accrual of wealth. In the past, these were largely the same thing. That's why it seems like people aren't becoming more conservative as they get older anymore. Because the paths to wealth have largely disappeared.
And of course most conservatives aren't wealthy, but if you look at them for just a short time (especially in the US), you'll see that they don't think of themselves as poor - they're just "temporarily displaced billionaires" who will make it big any day now and then they'll own the boot rather than be squashed under its heel. Or they're just bigots. There's always that option.
The older people I know who vote Democrat complain all the time about how expensive everything is these days and nobody can afford anything.
The bullshit "Nobody wants to work" narrative is absolutely pushed by conservatives.
Thank you friend. Your are seeing truth.
Its class warfare at its most insidious
While I get the sentiment, this is serious hyperbole
Its really not hyperbolic at all.
In 1958 child laborers were paid $1 per hour, the minimum wage at the time. Assuming that child worked 40 hours in a week, they would have made a little over $2k in the year. Relative to the GDP of the united states at the time (about $480B) that would equate to making over $1M per year today. Therefore, everyone currently making less than $1M per year (pretty much everybody) has less buying power than the average 10 year old child laborer in 1958.
With this in mind, its easier to see how inflation doesnt tell the whole story. That $1 minimum wage might equate to $12 today, which is higher than the federal minimum wage and the state minimum in about 25 states. But even if the minimum wage were brought on par with that base metric (which again was considered the appropriate wage for literal children), a person making $12/hr would have absolutely no buying power relative to a minimum wage earner back then. To be precise, it would be less than 2.5% of it.
Anyone buying a home in 1968 is not an Xer. That's a birth year.
Ate you just trying to be rude?
The poingvisbits the elites. Thats facts. Its not an age thing. Hell it ain't even really a poliyics thing. Is the elite holding you down and keeping you arguing with other poor people. If is what it is
The economics of it have shifted over time. If you were born in 1968 you might have graduated university into Black Monday, and finished grad school in time for the dot.com meltdown. I did. Those are far from the boomer like conditions of the 1960s and 70s.
Graduated university? Dude. I was waaaay too poor for that.
It's not just Gen Xers, speaking as a millennial, I bought a house with my wife in 2015 that was just over 2x our combined income at the time, which was not very high as we were both recently out of school, and we refinanced in '21 for a 2.7% interest rate. Out of control home prices nationwide coupled with high interest rates only hit after covid
I appreciate the insight as I'm a bit older and can't look at it from that vantage. , but I'd ask if it wasn't always going to go up again after the 08 bubble.
But I'm not economist. Just going off memory, so file this under "could be?"
I'm a millennial. Bought my house in a rural location for $70k at 3% interest in 2018
Due to the out of control housing market, it's now "worth" $150k
This market makes it impossible for younger generation to have a chance.