Let’s Teach Our Children To Be Successful

On November 21, The NC Family Policy Council posted an article about the keys to help our young people become successful adults.

The article notes:

While some of these trends have been beneficial (I’m personally a fan of working remotely), not all of these have been good for our society. Many of the values that the parents of these two generations have tried to pass on have instead been tossed to the wayside. Principles like the importance of getting a good education, waiting until marriage to have children, or getting a good job have been ignored more and more.

While the long-lasting impacts of these lifestyle changes are yet to be seen, researchers Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox have confirmed that these “traditional” values are actually beneficial for individuals, giving them the information to build what they’ve termed the “Success Sequence.”

The Success Sequence

The report from Wang and Wilcox states that Millennials are most likely to live an economically successful life and avoid poverty if they follow these three steps:

    1. Graduate from high school or get a GED by their mid-twenties;
    2. Work full time;
    3. Marry before having children.

This sounds an awful lot like what my generation was told growing up. Here’s the evidence for their model:

    • 97% of Millennials who follow this sequence are not poor when they reach adulthood. The link remains strong when this cohort of young Americans reaches their mid-30s.
    • 94% of young adults from lower-income families who followed the success sequence are not poor.
    • 95% of young adults from non-intact families who followed the success sequence are not poor.
    • The poverty gap between college and high school graduates is small among those who followed the success sequence.

Correcting For Disadvantages

What is interesting is that this works across all of the variables that are often cited as reasons for people to be economically disadvantaged, including race, gender, parents’ low economic status, not receiving a college degree, and being from a non-intact family. The poverty rate for adults between the ages of 32 and 38 after completing each step is well under 10%, even for those experiencing the disadvantages mentioned above.

These are the values the parents of the baby boomers taught their children and grandchildren. It’s time to go back to those values.

The article includes a video summary:

A Decision That Upholds The Constitution

On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. The program represents the federal government interfering in a signed contract–similar to the government’s interference in contracts between renters and landlords during the Covid pandemic.

The article reports:

The United States government has stopped taking applications for student debt relief, after a federal judge blocked President Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, according to a notice on a government website.

A judge in Texas who was appointed by former President Donald Trump ruled on Thursday that Biden’s plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt was unlawful and must be vacated. The Biden administration is appealing the ruling.

In July 2021, The New York Post reported the following:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disputed the notion that President Biden has the authority to unilaterally ​cancel students’ federal loans.​

“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” Pelosi said during her weekly news conference on Wednesday.

“He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”

However, the President signed an Executive Order providing student loan forgiveness, and applications have poured in.

The student loan forgiveness program, even if it does not move forward, has served its purpose.

On Wednesday, Breitbart reported the following:

Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast their ballots in favor of Democrats 63 percent of the time in the 2022 elections, exit polling data found.

Data from NBC exit polls found that the demographic, comprised of Generation Z and the Millennials, voted 63 percent for Democrats and just 35 percent for the Republicans.

Generation Z and the Millennials were promised free stuff and do not have the education or the critical thinking skills to understand that free stuff isn’t free. The government has no source of revenue other than printing money or taxing Americans. I suspect we will see more promises of free stuff for this group in the future as this group traditionally does not come out and vote at election time. This time Generation Z and Millennials made the difference.

The Latest Economic Numbers

On Friday, Market Watch reported that the U.S. economy did better than expected during the first three months of 2019.

The article reports:

Reports of the demise of the U.S. economy proved unfounded as first-quarter activity showed surprising strength. The U.S. economy expanded at a 3.2% annual pace in the first three months of 2019, the government said Friday.

The gain was well above forecasts. Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 2.3% increase in gross domestic product. The economy grew at a 2.2% rate in the final three months of 2018.

Inflation moderated a bit in the first quarter.

The article includes other good economic news:

Final sales to domestic purchasers, which excludes trade and inventory behavior, rose 2.3% in the first quarter, the smallest gain in three years, but still well above what economists were expecting.

The value of inventories increased to $128.4 billion from $96.8 billion, adding to GDP.

The trade sector added a little more than 1% to growth in the first quarter. Exports rose 3.7%, while imports dropped by the same amount, leading to a smaller trade deficit.

Offsetting these gains, consumer spending decelerated to a 1.2% gain, the slowest increase in a year.

Business fixed investment decelerated to a relatively slow 2.7% gain, down from a 5.4% gain in the prior quarter. Investment in structures fell 0.8%, the third straight decline.

Investment in new housing was another weak spot. Residential investment dropped 2.8%, the fifth straight quarterly decline.

I believe that the weakness in the housing market is being caused by a number of things. The millennials, the generation that would currently be entering the housing market, are weighed down by student debt. There is also a different attitude among young Americans about owning a house that there was a few generations ago. In the past, many Americans looked at their home as an investment–something that would grow in value over the years. Many older people began with a ‘starter house’–a small house that allowed them to enter into the housing market. Today, couples are having children later than previous generations. Their first house is paid for by two incomes, and they are not dealing with the expense of having children. The concept of a ‘starter house’ is no longer with us. Those facts, along with the price of the home most young people want to own are working to slow down the housing market. I am not convinced any of those factors are going to change.

The Millennial Generation Is Growing Up

Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an article observing changes in the political affiliation of the millennial generation. Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” The millennial generation is illustrating the truth of that statement. The millennial generation is roughly defined as those people currently between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. As they are aging, some of their political ideas are changing. It should also be noted that the millennial generation is 71 million strong and almost as large as the baby boomer generation.

As the millennial generation grows up, they are getting married, buying homes, and starting families. They are beginning to re-evaluate the liberal ideas they espoused in their younger years and to calculate the cost of some of these lofty visions.

The article reports:

According to the census data, the median age at which women are getting married is now 27.4, and for men it’s 29.5. Given that the age range for millennials is roughly 18 to 38, that’s right in the middle of this generation.

Marriage alone can make a big difference in terms of political views. The IBD/TIPP poll, for example, has consistently found that married women are far more conservative on most issues than single women.

The article explains the impact of the Trump economy of the millennials:

There’s another factor at play here. And that’s the upturn in the economy under President Trump.

For years, millennials suffered as President Obama’s policies of tax, spend and regulate produced the weakest economic recovery in modern times. Wages stagnated, millions of workers left the workforce entirely, and surveys showed that millennials were staying in their parents’ homes in record numbers.

Many have no doubt noticed the change in the economy since President Trump started dismantling the regulatory state and since Republicans passed the epic tax reform.

The employment-to-population ratio among 24- to 34-year-olds, for example, is finally back to its pre-recession level of 79%, after remaining stuck in the low- to mid-70% range for most of the Obama years.

The Economic Optimism Index among those age 18 to 24 is now at 59.3, according to the IBD/TIPP Poll. It has averaged 57 since Trump took office. (Anything over 50 is optimistic, under 50 is pessimistic.) Among those age 25 to 44, the optimism index is 53.5, which is higher than the overall index.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article–there is a lot of surprising information included in the article.