A Generation in the Red
Bush’s tax rebates won’t do much to help us younger, debt-laden working stiffs.
Recession got you down? Not to worry. Any day now, everyone who filed a tax return and earned less than $75,000 last year can look forward to some extra cash. The Bush administration put the first recession-special tax rebate checks in the mail, just in time to save our failing economy.
Or not. Food and gasoline prices are on the rise. Home prices are crashing. Our economy has been shedding jobs consistently since January. Not surprisingly, the Federal Reserve came out with a study last week showing that personal debt — that is, not including mortgages — rose a sharp $15.3 billion in March, hitting an all-time high of $2.6 trillion.
Given all this, Bush’s rebate consolation prize isn’t doing much to console me or, I doubt, anyone else of my generation. I’m a gainfully employed 27-year-old, and I use my credit card to buy food because I only have $12 in my bank account. I fear getting sick — not because I don’t have insurance but because I couldn’t afford the co-pays and deductible. It’s hard for me to see how an extra $300 or $600 is really going to be, as Bush promised, “a shot in the arm to keep a fundamentally strong economy healthy.”
Someone please tell me, are these rebates going to do anything more than help us pay off our credit card bills?
Americans 25 to 34 carry more debt than any other generation in history. According to the public policy research institute Demos, college graduates leave school with about $20,000 in student loans. We also have more credit card debt: $4,358 on average, 47% higher than young people in 1989. Our job security is way down too, with an increasing number of us being hired for “temp” jobs instead of as full-time employees. Whatever the bosses call it — “perma-lancer,” “independent contractor” — it translates the same: long hours with no benefits and no severance when they let you go.
Trust me, working three jobs without benefits is only romantic for a year or two. After that it’s scary. And it’s not just me charging my milk and eggs; 45% of Americans 34 and under use a credit card for basic necessities such as rent and groceries.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical. Economies go through ups and downs. Maybe these tax rebates actually will help. Or at least, maybe we’ve already hit rock bottom and have nowhere to go but up.
But to my untrained eye, the problem appears to have surpassed the point at which even a $153-billion package — a tiny fraction of what American consumers owe in personal debt — can save us. The secure, full-time jobs with benefits that once kept people my age afloat, that created the financial security to settle down and start families, are evaporating. In the meantime, our government is cutting basic social services while charging up its own deficit on corporate tax breaks, a couple of wars and, yes, even by sending millions of us a few hundred dollars in tax rebates.
Sure, the extra cash is nice — maybe I can get American Express off my back about those late fees — but where’s the long-term solution? I, like a good number of people in my generation, live paycheck to paycheck. If I lose my job or face a medical disaster, what safety net is going to catch me?
Erica Sackin is a writer who works at a public interest communications firm in New York.
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
erica…..trust me it won’t help millions of americans who are older than you and i….and it’s a shame,because i bet that 65% of all debt americans have is probably related to basic necessities or some type of medical bill……..
My sister works in the medical field and can barely afford her copays. Yet, what is she doing with her tax rebate? Buying a flat screen TV. Unfortunately, I think she’s the norm.
I too pretty much live from check to check working a full-time and a part-time job. But, even though I could sure use the money, I intend to donate my entire rebate check to an anti-war or environmental concern. Just my little way of fighting back to Bush’s stupid economic policies.
I think I’m going to spend mine on a couple hundred pounds of dried beans, a large quantity of water, and other things to help my family weather the storm that is coming.
Thankfully my wife and I learned the lesson of credit cards years ago, have payed them off since and dropped our standard of living to not require them, so we’ll be able to buy our beans without fear of repossession.
Really is a foundation for national failure …to get a decent job (or so one hopes), you need a degree; to get a degree, you get crippled with debt; to get out of debt, you get tied-down as a serf; to get out of that before you’re dead, you get no savings for retirement; to get your children to college, they get to pay their own way …and the cycle begins anew. Ugly!
An entire swath of the population in debt is truly a bad thing, as history instructs. The Feudal system of medieval Europe and the Sharecropper economy of the Old South was predicated on debt being the condition of a majority of the population that bound them to rapacious elite. Considering the conduct of our current crop of elite types, being in hock to them is an even more unattractive scenario.
Erica Sackin is a very, very bright young person who “gets it” about major trends, especially the big ones about the massive debt of individuals and that corporations are moving as quickly as possible to “Temps” to avoid having any commitments to actual people. It’s worthy of note, too, that the agencies supplying the temps are slicing off significant portions of the pay that used to go to the workers themselves–another form of wealth shift from people to corporations.
I wish high-schoolers and college kids were all listening closely to Erica. It appears to me that they’re not.
What’s the long term solution proposed by “our” government? Serfdom or extinction seem to be the two options being developed by “our” “leaders.”
>Perhaps I’m being too cynical. Economies go through ups and downs. Maybe these tax rebates actually will help. Or at least, maybe we’ve already hit rock bottom and have nowhere to go but up.<
No, you’re not being too cynical. Back in my high school days (the 80s) I read a book called “Falling from Grace: The decline of the Middle Class” that predicted all of this. Then in the 90s I struggled to get by at manufacturing jobs and bought a house I couldn’t afford because it was the “American Dream.” Fortunately I wised up and got out of that trap before the present economic implosion. Now I live in a collective house with a bunch of other alienated artist-activist types. We have a garden out back and scrounge everything we can’t create ourselves. We may not live as well as most Americans think they should, but at least we live as free from corporate control as possible.
In materialistic terms, it’s all down hill from here. Your generation won’t live as well as mine or my parents’ did, thanks to stagnant wages and globalization. The huge amounts of money being wasted to preserve our empire are just icing on the cake. As an angry young man in another declining empire once sang, “No future for me/ no future for you.”
The long-term solution is to wake up and rise up.
The controllers of the political filth class are not your friends.
You are, so far as they are concerned, an animal to be used for their profit and abused for their pleasure.
The tax rebate and any other “solutions” are designed to drag you deeper into their control so they can grind your face deeper into the dirt.
Mad as Hell and Going to Take It Some More?
I see no shortage of people saying they’re mad as hell.
What I don’t see enough of is people saying they’re not going to take it anymore.
My guess is most people don’t know of any alternatives.
http://www.ic.org — food for thought
Good link, Clark Kent. Added to favorites for later research.
The entire system is imploding. It’s not just ‘the economy, stupid’, it’s our entire infrastructure, the fear of food scarcity (and the lousy food we eat, btw, which is poison). It’s our entire political system, education, etc. Let us not forget the all-powerful environment. I would suggest, before all, that we realign ourselves with the probability of cooperative living: growing our own food and sharing the surplus, riding bikes/horses/rollerskates, whatever. Our civilization has peaked and we’re only starting on the down-slide. I encourage you to find alternative life-styles while you can still charge it.
Just my thoughts.
Erica–You’re absolutely right. These rebates will do nothing to help you or the economy in general. They’re meant to fool people into thinking our “government” is doing something for working people–much like the ridiculous “gas holiday.” Our only hope is that your generation recognizes how bleak the situation is before it’s too late. Get organized and end the never-ending war mentality or we’re all screwed.
Tax rebate, what a cruel joke. I call the checks “Future taxes plus interest Wal-mart gift cards”.
These same thieves have stolen $2 trillion from the Social Security trust fund, well make that all the trust funds administered by the Federal government. Just add these checks to the future debt that is never going to be paid.
Neomunk is right, you better spend that check as soon as you get it on food and prepare for the day that you either can’t afford to go to the store or you go to the store and find it empty and closed.
agree, it’s going to get tough. I am about the same age and in the same boat as Erica. It’s hard describing this situation to older people because they have always known good times. In a strange way it’s comforting to see that there are others who have the same situation because maybe we can all get together to do something about it. I remember 2002-2005 were really bad years for employment but a lot of that got swept under the rug and there wasn’t any outcry. This time it should be different. Maybe this lack of material wealth will make us stronger as a nation and instead of this focus on individual financial gain, the greater impulse will be one towards community, which will not only be necessary but could be a lot of fun too.
Who, exactly, made you take out student loans?
“Maybe we’ve already hit rock bottom and have nowhere to go but up”? Whooooooooeeeeeeee!!!! If you really think that then you should use your credit card to buy bank stocks. Ha, ha, ha…just kidding.
hey clark kent- you’ve put your finger on the exact problem. the right wing plays for keeps! how many americans really want to face tear gas, clubs, tasers , dogs, water hoses, less than lethal projectiles and finally real bullets to protect their birthright. damn few. life is too short (and in the u.s. nasty and brutish) for people to spend it in a hospital, jail or prematurely, the morgue. gandhi found people desperate enough to follow him. americans turn up the volume on the tv and pop a can of beer. man may be a social animal but the u.s. may be the first nation to voluntary give up all remnants of this shared existance, the commonweal- to be safe and secure behind our walls and guns and bibles. it will be quite a ride. . .
we used ours to pay off the state and local taxes for 2008, and covered the gas card and the heat bill I’d floated on a credit card in February. Then I bought the kids a Mexican dinner, and that was about it.
Most of the people I know have done the same thing — the flat screen tv turns out to be the exception rather than the rule.
The check just staves off the inevitable for a couple of months, maybe: it’ll still all bomb out before Bush-boy leaves office
I don’t think the flat screen is the exception. I’m a Gen Xer, daughter of boomers. Many in my genereation and younger have a sense of entitlement, right now, to the lifestyle that took our folks years to attain.
I think more people ARE paying down debt with those rebate checks-but it’s debt that many of them ran up on stuff they couldn’t afford. Houses they couldn’t afford. Meals out.
I see it as Bush’s friendly nod toward socialism.
Whoa, children, back off. Where did you get the idea that baby boomers have always had it good?
This is how it went. Our parents starved during the depression, scrimped during WW2 (female. Males fought). After WW2, they had us. They were employed and we ate well.
We moved out in the 70s. We lived in poverty. Most of the men did time in the military and then came home to no jobs.
Eventually, we found jobs and started doing better. During the Reagan years, we went through a horrible depression.
Then American capitalism found that perpetual borrowing led to perpetual booms. So some of us have done all right.
Soon that will change.
And by the way. There are laws in place that make it possible for FEMA to take all the food you’ve providentially stored. They can take your house and your garden and put you in work camps.
Maybe they won’t, but they can. And they can take your guns. If they want to, they can take them from your cold, dead, burned to a crisp, hands. Look at Waco.
“It’s hard describing this situation to older people because they have always known good times.”
Ashu I think you’ll find it isnt so hard to describe this to us older folk. I’m old enough to be your Grandmother. (MY mother generation lived thru the DEpression-brought to you (us) by the same corps as today)
I paid off student loans for College and Grad school and put my son thru private school.
In business for 16 years, living paycheck to paycheck, (paying off above loans)without insurance when along came my State government and gave my business to Managed Care and Hmo’s. Lost my business, lost my house, retired into poverty.
But, been doing research on “Citizen Abuse” for 5 years and I dont have to tell you its rampant and looking at some ways out of the quagmire.
Can’t lie down and let them run over you. Don’t get Mad, Get even! Join an NGO group that appeals to you, or start youre own. When the change comes (& it aint coming with Obama or anyone else likely to be elected), you WANT TO HAVE A VOICE; if youre not part of a group, you won’t.
One doesnt have to be a Psychologist to interpret the attitude that POWER has toward the people, we’re scum as long as we produce income for them and then we’re dross.
Gotta disagree with the Boomer who said it was hard for us too. Bullshit. When I was in my upper teens and twenties, in the Seventies, I used to get crap jobs at low wages–$1.85/hour, which was the minumum wage in Connecticut when I got my first job. I’d work as a waitress or dishwasher for a couple of weeks, and then live on the money for a month. True, I was a dirty hippie hitchhiking around, didn’t have a car or a consumer mentality (I was raised without a TV). But still–those lousy wages were better than minimum wage today. You weren’t forced to get car insurance, for example. Soon we’ll be forced to get health insurance, too.
Surely young people will drown in debt, not only personal debt but also the unpayable debt the Republicans are saddling them with for the endless wars and the endless tax cuts for the rich. And that may be the best case scenario–that’s if civilization lasts at all. If I were younger, I’d get land, build a super-efficient house, get a big garden going, be sure I had a skill that didn’t depend on a complex economy or fossil fuels (actually I’m doing all that myself). As some above noted, the odds of pulling this off are much better if you are part of a community (do check the Intentional Communities website, they have a very searchable database). The odds of surviving whatever catastrophe is coming will surely be much better for those in communities, too.
Just get rid of the credit card, along with the consumerism.
If you are smart you would use it to pay for gas. The money is just to offset for high gas. Even if you buy consumer products you will be putting that money back in the pump.