The Age of Inequality by Jeremy Gantz

Author:Jeremy Gantz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

“HEY MILLENNIALS, DEBT BECOMES YOU”

By Mischa Gaus (2006)

The children of baby boomers are the new debtor class. Buckling under a heavy weight of debt, new workers step into an economy of low-wage and contingent work, a combination that makes the basics of adulthood increasingly unattainable.

“We grew up in the Reagan era where everything was fake, voodoo economics, and we’re not seeing the connections,” says Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to be Young. “I don’t think we can continue treating people as disposable, not providing them with health care or the means to save.”

Educational debt is the most visible—but not the only—barrier to the well-being of the “millennial generation,” roughly defined as Americans born after 1978. Every gate on the way to middle-class life is now tougher to unlock. Mortgages, health insurance expenses, car maintenance, child-care, and tax loads for two-income families have all ballooned. The familiar combination of summer work, a part-time job during the school year, and a little help from home doesn’t begin to cover today’s college costs.

“Students are in a pretty deep financial hole,” says Luke Swarthout, higher education associate for the State Public Interest Research Groups, which advocate on a variety of consumer, environmental, and good-government issues.

Some never emerge from their chasm of liabilities. The Supreme Court recently decided that retirees’ Social Security checks can be garnished for old student debts, and changes to bankruptcy law last year make it nearly impossible to discharge educational loans.

For students who approach their working lives seeking returns beyond pure remuneration, rising debt loads postpone basic decisions. Even with a scholarship to American University’s law school, Julia Graff, twenty-eight, started her career as a staff attorney at the Delaware American Civil Liberties Union last year facing $80,000 in debt. She anticipates paying lenders until she retires. Graff knew her ambition to pursue a nonprofit career meant she would forgo luxuries. But her debt-to-income ratio means trips to university dental clinics and taking on odd jobs like tutoring and translating Spanish. “I live paycheck to paycheck,” Graff says. “Eventually I’m not going to want to live like I did when I was eighteen.”

And when lives don’t match up with debt schedules, the strain can be severe. After finishing community college, Mandy Minor, thirty, bounced around the University of South Florida before settling on business administration. She graduated five years ago, picking up $60,000 in consumer and student debt along with her diploma. Minor owns a small writing and design firm with her husband and had a daughter five months ago. She pays $400 a month just to maintain her debt load and has given up on buying a house. She worries how to provide health insurance once her daughter no longer qualifies for Florida’s state-provided care.

Ensuring economic security is not solely an issue of self-interest for young people. Because higher education remains the most important factor for predicting economic success—and thus an opportunity to bridge inequality—it is a social justice concern as well.

STRUGGLING FOR

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