It seems that every week, a Democratic presidential hopeful tries to separate themselves from the growing pack by promising more and more free stuff.
While Americans, in general, like free things, this isn’t always a winning strategy, and I’m not sure it will be very politically profitable in the long run.
It is widely believed that the “Millennial” population has totally embraced socialism, and that generation will eventually sweep a Democrat into office with a mandate to bring about universal, well, everything.
That generation is probably one of the most misunderstood in American history.
I should know, I am considered one, even though I was born right on the line.
I honestly think I have more Boomer in me than anything.
Sociologists and media types tend to pigeon hole people into groups and then label them.
That’s not a good practice to begin with, but it is especially unhelpful when it comes to one of the largest generations of people ever.
The so-called Millennial generation is so large that it covers people in their teens to folks like me in their mid-30s.
Like any large segment of the population, there is a mixture of personalities, and each individual has their own belief system.
It’s true that there are clusters who think alike. That’s always the case, but the Millennial generation includes liberals, conservatives, moderates, people on the far, far left and people on the far, far right.
The Baby Boomer generation created arguably the greatest wealth of any American generation after World War II.
The following group, Generation X, then created arguably the most massive debt of any group in American history.
The Millennial generation unfortunately had to watch as the wealth of the nation and their parents crumbled in the mid-to-late 2000s.
The financial collapse of 2008 was not only financially traumatic for most middle class households, it was even more psychologically damaging.
Growing up, I could still see the effects of the Great Depression in how my grandparents managed money and resources. That kind of thing sticks with people, and it sticks with an entire generation sometimes.
It’s understandable that the current group, ages 18-36, do not want to put their children through the same fiscal disaster we saw a decade or so ago.
Politicians are quick to exploit those fears, and they are even quicker to make promises they know they have no intention of keeping.
There is a trillion dollar student debt problem in this country, and it will come to head one day. There’s also a multi-trillion dollar national debt problem that was not stemmed in the least by a so-called conservative supermajority in Washington D.C. from 2016-2018.
A lot of younger people believe they are paying the price for the mistakes of those who came before them, but they sometimes are blinded by the fact that a big government program designed to forgive public college debt will likely result in the same catastrophic results for higher ed that we’ve seen when government has interfered too much with healthcare and secondary education.
Higher costs and lower quality.
I believe this younger generation will surprise a lot of people when it goes to the polls in 2020.
While the media focuses on the youth’s embrace of extreme ideologies, on both the left and the right, most of these Americans are probably going to fall somewhere in the middle when they vote, and this will likely not be good news for the candidates who have gone all in on turning big government into mega government.
