YOUNG PROFESSIONALS UNITE !

Our country has an insidious and growing upward mobility problem not garnishing a great deal of attention.  Generational inequality is affecting our young professionals and is making their lives a mess.  The group is too busy working to complain a lot.  Because they are our best and brightest achievers, they do not receive a great deal of sympathy.  I am not discussing the unemployed in their 20s, which is a different issue.  My focus is the well educated professionals in their early 30s, who are reaching their career goals after years of academic rigor.

 While many of these young professional and business graduates have earned a degree and landed a job, the American dream of starting a family and buying a home is often elusive if not out of reach.  The recession has insured that starting salaries and yearly raises are low by historical standards.  Student loans are eating up a larger share of income.  Low mortgage rates are offset by onerous borrowing requirements.  Moreover, child care costs are a large impediment to working and having children.

When my contemporaries were “starting out” in the 70’s, tuition and student loans were low and the first marriage, home and child were no brainers.  The culture told us that as baby boomers, we were entitled to become masters of the universe.  The cooperative economic stars aligned to make it so.  The fact that at the end of our management tenure we drove the bus over a cliff, with billions of surplus assets on board, has not stopped us from insisting on our “just” rewards.

 The economists report that in today’s America, as many as 100 million Americans live in households that are earning less than their parents did at a similar age. In 1980, a year at college or professional school cost in the range of 12 per cent of median family income.  Today the cost is 26 per cent. Pell grants cover an increasingly smaller portion of the cost.

Apart from education, our political and economic systems have dedicated a majority of public resources to those receiving AARP magazines.  There are a lot of us baby boomers, we vote and no politician is about to challenge us.  What is clear is that there are fewer and fewer resources to address systemic non elderly needs.

I believe there are three paths to attack this intergenerational inequality our young people (professional and otherwise) are facing.  First, they need to organize.  “Occupy Wall Street” does not speak to the problem.  Help Us “Un-Occupy Your Basement and Give You Grandchildren” does.  Forming AAYP (American Association of Young People) with a magazine, 30 million members and a few lobbyists would help.

Second, we baby boomers must give up our selfish view on entitlements.  If we want our social contract to be passed to the next generation, we must recognize we will not live forever, even with double hip and knee replacements.  The universe no longer revolves around us.  We need to support rational cuts to retirement benefits, higher taxes on unearned income and reasonable health care end of life policies.  It is time to give back and get out of the way.

Third, our political leaders must adopt modern civilized positions on the cost of education and child care.  The world’s most advanced democratic societies provide both at little or no cost.  After all, our young people are not asking for it all like we did.  They simply want our boomer generation to tidy up its mess and to give back what our parents gave to keep the American dream alive.