I’m really not sure what the future holds for America, but it is looking more and more like future generations will be working til they drop (like most poor people do already):
Most companies that have suspended contributions to employees’ 401(k) plans are expected to reinstate the match when the economy improves, but the match may be significantly different.
About a quarter of companies have either suspended their 401(k) plan match or are considering doing so because of the economic downturn, according to a recent survey by CFO Research Services and Charles Schwab. The list of companies that have suspended matches includes Hewlett-Packard, Sears Holdings, Starbucks and Eastman Kodak.
However, a recent survey by Watson Wyatt found that nearly half of large companies that have reduced or suspended their 401(k) match plan to reinstate it within 12 months. Only 5% of companies said they don’t plan to reinstate the match.
But some companies are considering changing the amount of the match, or the way it’s calculated, employee benefits analysts say.
Clearly we need to privatize social security.
SGEW
A thought: Most status quo politicians are basically preemptive counter-revolutionaries.
In order to have a successful revolution, the aggrieved segment of the population should have: a) basic education and/or information dispersal, b) sufficient health, c) sufficient nutrition, and d) free time. How many partisan policies can you think of that sometimes appear to be specifically designed to hinder these benefits to certain (i.e., poor) people? It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?
Or, probably, I’ve just been recently reading too much about 19th century slave revolts. Probably.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
And speaking as a young person, may I say how wonderful it is that so many of the jobs in my chosen field are tied up by people in their late sixties who show no signs of retiring?
donovong
“And speaking as a young person, may I say how wonderful it is that so many of the jobs in my chosen field are tied up by people in their late sixties who show no signs of retiring?”
Yeah, because they are all out to screw the youngsters, huh?
It’s not like they really NEED all that food and shelter and shit.
arguingwithsignposts
Speaking as a middle-aged person, I do not welcome the thought of working until I drop. I’d be glad to hand over my job at 60 or even 65 to someone younger. I work in an office with people nearing retirement who talk about their pension and 401K dropping in value, and I say “at least you have retirement to look forward to. I don’t anticipate ever retiring.”
sigh.
Will
“Yeah, because they are all out to screw the youngsters, huh?
It’s not like they really NEED all that food and shelter and shit.”
Unfortunately, the system is set up so that the older workers retire at a relatively early age and are replaced by the younger ones. If that doesn’t happen, the younger ones don’t make the kind of salaries necessary to do things like buy new houses, new cars and start families.
When that doesn’t happen, things start to get screwed up all around. You have more people working till they drop at one end and younger people taking on debt they can’t afford to either make an attempt to live the middle class lifestyle or get more education in hopes of getting a more lucrative job.
Draw this out long enough and it screws up everyone.
PeakVT
Is it time to declare to 401K experiment over? In retrospect, creating a huge class of casual retail investors has meant easy pickings for the pros, who either made money on the fees or by being on the other side of the trade.
Unfortunately, defined benefit plans are already gone outside of government employment and a few large businesses. Which leaves… what?
Michael
Power of the markets and long term investment strategies, baby – that’s what we’ve been sold my entire working life.
And it has all been for shit, designed to enrich a few via some real short term thinking.
Interesting that you can’t seem to put things like family businesses into your favorably taxed retirement portfolios, isn’t it?
Poopyman
The vast majority of benefits were won (often with blood) by the unions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The change from a blue collar to white collar workforce was accomplished without the apparent need for unions – because all the hard work was already done. Then it became common for white collar workers to work more than 40 hours/week. And of course the pension plans dried up to be replaced by the 401k, Health care – well, we all know about that.
So Mission Accomplished, corporations! The workforce needs to organize once again, and I don’t see how that’s going to happen now that we’re all white collar and “comfortable”. You would think by now people would be more demonstrably angry.
Steeplejack
@PeakVT:
I hate coming off as a flaming radical leftist (yet again), but if you have a conspiratorial turn of mind you could see the whole “401(k) experiment” as a neat trick to get corporations out from under the burden of those pesky pension things. As you said, defined-benefit pensions are going the way of the dodo, and it looks as if fewer and fewer Americans are going to get even the cold comfort of a 401(k), or, if they do, it will be in a watered-down form. Mission accomplished!
Brick Oven Bill
The US faces one of two choices:
1. Default on its debt; or
2. Print money to pay its debt and obligations, creating an inflationary death spiral for the dollar, as social programs are indexed to inflation.
I would bet on #2. It was in the Chinese interest to pretend to be naïve a year ago. This pretense propped up the dollar. The fact that Chinese students are being allowed to laugh at Geithner means that this game is coming to an end. Probably kicking in this fall.
In 1729, Franklin stated that there is intrinsic value in labor, metals, and land. To this I’d add fossil fuels. So, my Balloon Juice acquaintances, I would recommend keeping some extra food in the pantry, and learning some personal defense skills, for the period in which our society will reestablish the concept of value.
Historically, when a currency collapses, its sponsoring government is overtaken by a neighbor with a solid currency. Since there is nobody to take over the US, and because of the scope of this thing we call the welfare state, this could be interesting.
kay
@PeakVT:
I’m approaching paranoid on this. I think we wuz had.
I feel sympathy for those in their sixties who have to keep working past their planned retirement. They’re not the people who are crying in my office, though.
The people who are crying in my office are in their fifties, and laid off. They believe that when the job market recovers, they aren’t going to be hired, because it’s cheaper to hire those just entering the workforce. They’re looking into an abyss. They’re 10 years out from Social Security, and they’re afraid they’ll never work again. Even if they retrain, they’re going to be competing with a massive onslaught of 22 year olds looking for work.
I don’t contradict them, but instead offer sympathy and an ear. I think they’re right, and I don’t know what they do. I don’t have anything to say.
gbear
This is exactly the kind of post I wanted to see on my 55th birthday. /sarcasm
I’m pretty much resigned to no retirement before age 66, and I’m just trying to find some directions that I can go that will keep this job interesting for another 11 years. I should be able to manage that with the actual work I do, but putting up with the current set of co-workers for another 11 years may have me searching for the perfect high bridge or ledge.
I do feel sorry for 20-somethings trying to find a decent job with all of us oldsters hanging on. Even the new hires that I’ve seen around here are in their 30s and 40s because we’re grabbing the people with field experience.
JackieBinAZ
The real damage is in how workers are accepting the mantra of “be glad that you have a job at all” as they’re asked to suck up cuts in their already lagging wages and benefits while taking on the extra work of their laid-off colleagues. It just furthers the already-rooted narrative that employment is a kind of charity extended by benevolent employers and that the appropriate response is unquestioning gratitude.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Hah. No sympathy.
Try finding a job when you’re over 50.
gbear
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
Become a state prison guard. Corrections has a mandatory retirement age of 55 (at least here in MN).
Leelee for Obama
As I have said in other posts, the Thelma and Louise option for retirement will be sold to the older citizens, like me, as a patriotic thing to do. Who wrote “Boom”, Chris Buckley? I didn’t laugh when I read the review, and I’m not laughing now. I always thought I’d die working as a server or rest. mgr. and if my life keeps going the way it is now-I’ll consider that a win!
Emma
I am lucky in that I’ve had jobs where the retirement contributions are turned over to a third party, and the third party is TIAA-CREF. My losses have been minimal. But when I look at the estimates on how much it’s going to take to live at even an approximate standard of living to what I have now (middle class by the skin of my teeth), I won’t be able to retire until I’m 75 at the earliest. The other option is retire, go live somewhere else. My cousins in Spain buy health insurance for two for $900/year. It’s starting to look like my only option. I hate it. I love this country, dammit, and I don’t want to have to consider anywhere else.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@donovong:
I got mouths to feed too, asshole.
linda
damn, could naomi klein have been any more prescient…. shock doctrine, baby, coming home to roost. no longer just for asians and latin americans.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
Yep. Exactly.
I can understand why people aren’t retiring anymore when they’re supposed to. I can also understand how much that’s fucking my personal finances up. I don’t think it makes me an awful person to think that something’s wrong with this picture, and to complain about how it impacts my young family.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Poopyman:
We’re getting there.
PeakVT
@Steeplejack: I agree that companies would much rather have defined contribution plans than defined benefit plans. As we’ve seen with the auto and steel industries, a big overhang of retires can be deadly for a shrinking company. Other companies learned that lesson well.
401Ks have been sold largely on the appeal of control. “Plan for your own retirement!” But how is a person who puts maybe 1-2 hours a month into managing their funds supposed compete against a full-time pro armed with the findings of research department, or at least the data available in a Bloomberg terminal? Buy and hold hasn’t worked, and why should anyone expect it to when the big bucks seem to come from active trading? Some people have managed their 401Ks well. Others have struck it rich on company stock. But my understanding is that most people have seen lousy returns, and haven’t put enough money in to begin with.
Maybe I’m totally off-base here. Dunno.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Bingo!
Also, we don’t need to privatize Social Security now. Why? Because the 401k experiment has turned into the 101k experiment, ie., nobody can afford to retire.
And since nobody can afford to retire, nobody will tap into Social Security.
Problem solved! Nothing more to see here people, move along.
The right wing has spent my entire adult life wrecking this country and they’ve done a damn fine job of it.
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: We all have mouths to feed. A lot of seniors are already raising grandchildren, and as the sandwich generation faces ruination the poverty will ripple both up and down the demographic curve.
Twenty years from now we will no longer see the nuclear family as a common phenomenon or as the social norm. It was only possibly for a couple generations enjoying the unprecedented wealth of the second half of the 20th century.
Chinn Romney
I once planned on retiring at 58. Hah. I’m now 50. The free market philosophers had their way and half my retirement money went poof!. The ex-wive is getting half of what’s left next month. Sorry Gen-XY&Zers you’re going to have to keep flipping burgers for a while, it’s starting to look like 70 before ol’ Chinn steps aside.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Xenos:
You’re probably right.
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
By the time I’m over 50, we’ll probably be selling ourselves out as serfs on manor farms, tilling the land in exchange for a portion of the crops. My children will grow up to become semi-literate peasants of the neo-feudal estate system your generation worked so hard (through its greed, hedonism, and apathy) to turn America in to.
Fuck you very much, Reagan voters.
arguingwithsignposts
@Emma:
That’s an idea there. When will we have stories about “retirement drain” where people are going to spend their retirement money elsewhere?
I’m tempted more often than not to see if there’s any way I can get to a country with health care and a general social safety net. America is great, but we are a vicious bunch of self-focused individuals.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Chinn Romney:
Yeah. Either that, or we’ll emigrate to China in hopes of finding a decent job and a better standard of living. (That would be hilarious, if it didn’t seem like it’s going to become horribly true.)
Will
As a single, employed man in his mid 30s, I have some hope that I have enough time for things to collapse and get better before I hit my mid-sixties. A lot can happen in three decades.
Of course, I have to pretend that the environmental forecasts don’t exist. If those prove to be even a tiny bit accurate, retirement will be the last thing I’ll be worrying about thirty years from now.
As for starting a family, ha ha ha ha. I’m a renter with graduate school debt and a paid for GM car that’s closing in on 150,000 miles. Even if I did get married, it have to be with someone who made much more than I do for me to ever consider having a kid.
Leelee for Obama
For the win!
jcricket
Thanks for highlighting one of the flaws of the entire 401k system. You could do all the right things (start saving in your 20s, keep it all in low-cost index funds) and simply by the decade you retire, get totally hosed (remember, because we’re all gonna live to 100 you can’t have all your investments in bonds at 65). I don’t think defined benefit pension plans are the solution either (look how those are hampering some of the big/old companies), but the 401k/IRA system is not really working. It wasn’t designed to be 2/3 or 3/4 of people’s retirements, and it certainly benefited from existing during the biggest, longest bull-market run in history. Now that’s over, and if the next 25 years aren’t like the last 25 years for the market, the 401k will be utterly insufficient for most retirees.
Frankly, I also get annoyed when lazy blogger asshats like Sullivan say the solution to Social Security’s
doomed financesminor actuarial deficit is to simply raise the retirement age or reduce benefits. How about, no, and no. Instead, we do what Obama proposed, raise the SS wage cap starting at $250k (with a donut hole between $105k and $250k). And frankly, assuming you don’t index for inflation, in about 20 years the gap will disappear and all wages will be taxed at the same amount for SS. Financial problem solved, and we can probably even raise benefits for people.Outside of people like Sully whose livelihood barely depends on their mental faculties and certainly doesn’t depend on their physical prowess (unless you count typing as physical) – it’s not simply that easy to work until you are 70. Even for “white collar professionals” there’s clearly age-related bias in hiring, and a decreased ability to do things that require fine motor control that comes once you’re into your 60s.
Yes, we’re living longer, but I would argue that requiring people work into their 70s before obtaining their relatively meager social security benefits is not moving the country in the right direction.
But of course in libertarian fantasy land having “choice” and “individual responsibility” for 100% of our own retirements leads us to nirvana!
Will
“That’s an idea there. When will we have stories about “retirement drain” where people are going to spend their retirement money elsewhere?”
That honestly may become an issue. There’s a very real movement abroad among the type of college educated or well-traveled seniors who aren’t afraid to live in another country. Like the first wave urban gentrifiers, they’re going to build senior ex-pat communities that make it easier and more comfortable for less adventurous retirees to follow them.
What happens when a significant amount of Social Security gets shipped abroad and pumped into foreign economies? This country was built by foreigners who followed the dream of a better life to here. Their descendants may well follow their ancestors’ example.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
I think employer contributions to retirement really are going the way of the dodo bird anyway. Maybe it’s different in the U.S., but here, you don’t get a pension or employer contributions to your RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) unless you work for a fairly large corporation or the government (or unionized things like schools and hospitals.)
Most of my generation has known since birth that we have to get our own RRSP, contribute to it ourselves, and basically take care of our own asses. Yes, we’ll all get the government-funded Old Age Security, and those of us who worked will get the Canada Pension Plan (which is funded via deductions from our paycheques, and that part IS matched by our employers), so there is that safety net to keep us away from having to eat cat food, but it’s really just barely enough to live off of, and only if you don’t have any debts. (We’re talking a payout of less than 5 figures a year.)
Is Social Security pretty much the same way? Or is it not even enough to buy cat food?
jcricket
@PeakVT: Just FYI, while I don’t disagree with your general premise, something like 75% of “actively managed” mutual funds fail to meet the benchmark for the index/sector they’re covering on a yearly basis. And over time, less than 4% of actively managed funds beat the index for a decade (and which 4% changes – look at any successful fund that was good for a decade, usually the next decade it lags the market).
So the “pros” aren’t beating the market, and the rest of us make all kinds of mistakes (or get screwed b/c our company doesn’t offer a 401k, or we lose jobs and can’t invest, or have poor choices in our 401k b/c our company gets kickbacks, or don’t have a financial education to even know what basic index funds to invest in, etc & so on).
I personally think SS should be beefed up (slightly more taxes = slightly more benefit = slightly more solid base for people’s retirements). Then the 401k/IRA thing should all be merged into a single, portable, individual retirement account (with any of the companies who currently offer either eligible to have your account). And if we’re gonna keep subsidizing big corporations we could instead subsidize their 401k matching, tyingtie tax breaks to things that benefit actual workers.
Combine this with better regulations and enforcement over the financial markets (decrease chances of massive bubble bursting), better financial advice for people throughout their lives (starting in school – like a “home ec” class for the 21st century) and you’d at least be better off. Our current policies are designed, at best, for people who are already privileged and likely already rich. Yes, it might “discourage” some of these people if we took away their special toys (ROTHs, unlimited deductibility of mortgage interest, super low special capital gains rate, etc) – but the other 95% of us are all dying here.
jenniebee
401k has always been a gift to keep the upper-middle class content anyway. I just looked at my statement this month – 10 years ago I scraped and saved for two years out of the nothing I was making to put money into my 401k. As in, I put money into the 401k instead of having a home phone kind of scraping. Then I turned contractor for years and didn’t have the 401k option. Last December I finally settled down and started packing dollars into the retirement fund.
The old 401k (now an IRA) had pretty good but not phenomenal rates of return. But after 6 months, the new 401k now has more money in it than the IRA.
So yay! Two years of Ramen noodles and “I don’t have a phone” to sock away $118.27 a month (I’ll never forget that number…) have gotten me six months ahead on my retirement planning. Whoop-de-do.
Jim-Bob
Snuffy@
Forgive me, but I think you have the wrong take on things here, Snuffy.
Don’t go for the jobs that already exist and are being done by others. They’re taken. Dur! Instead, look for ways to apply your ability, skills, and knowledge so that they’ll have the greatest value. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the rules for those sixty-somethings are different from the rules for those of us in our twenties, thirties, and forties.
KG
@34: I like the idea of making the 401k/IRA portable. I think a bigger problem is that a lot of stockbrokers (like mortgage brokers) turned out to be hucksters and completely ignored their fiduciary duties to their clients.
JackieBinAZ
When they have a compliant, second-world workforce, then they will be satisfied.
chopper
despite having a good, set job and putting a ton in my retirement (and likely my employer aint gonna drop the matching 401(k) bit anytime soon), it still makes me feel really good that i made bagels this morning.
when TSHTF, i’ll be the guy with the bagels.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Jim-Bob:
Thanks. That’s great advice after 7 years of college. I’ve already worked the overnight shift at Walmart with a FUCKING LAW DEGREE. It’s really easy to find ways to “apply” knowledge in this economy for young people, especially when your student loan payments are the equivalent of your rent payments.
This economy is shit. If I end up back at Walmart, though, I’ll be sure to take your advice to heart. Maybe I can litigate for my coworkers in the morning in exchange for a candy bar at break and help with unloading my extra pallet in Hardware.
Xenos
Social Security is enough to keep you alive if you get subsidized housing. Medicare for the elderly involves a lot of co-pays, and the part that covers prescriptions gives only partial coverage at best. So for a lot of people they eat (poorly) and get only some of the medication they need, and waste away in isolation and humiliation on some god-forsaken trailer park in Florida.
I used to be a welfare caseworker in a poor area of FL, so I may have an unrepresentative experience.
Either way, the promise of a comfortable retirement in the subtropics is a cruel hoax unless you have savings and additional forms of income, such as private and government pensions.
JackieBinAZ
Even a cynic like me has some hope that health care might do it. It helps that a lot of deep Republican strongholds have some of the shittiest access.
PeakVT
@jcricket: I was thinking of plain old trading by private money managers or hedge funds instead of active mutual funds. The latter seem to be primary about generating fees.
slippytoad
It’s time to admit that the free market sucks and can’t do economics.
Tax the fuck out of the rich to make up the Social Security shortfall, and up the payments to recipients.
Tax the fuck out of the rich to pay for medicare for all.
And finally, tax the fuck out of the rich to get all the money back they looted during the Post-Reagan Greed years. To hell with their whiny-ass-titty-babies.
Will
“Thanks. That’s great advice after 7 years of college. I’ve already worked the overnight shift at Walmart with a FUCKING LAW DEGREE. It’s really easy to find ways to “apply” knowledge in this economy for young people, especially when your student loan payments are the equivalent of your rent payments.”
I occasionally get to work with “entrepreneurs” at the day job. A sorrier class of perpetually broke hustlers you will never find.
For every success story, there are a thousand failures. And for every one of those success stories, there’s an untold tale of a wealthy family member either supporting them until they succeed, hooking them up with the right people or helping them find investors from their friends.
Unless you have some of that mojo behind you, you are much better off in this day and age following the college, internship, employer path. It’s equally fucked up these days, but the odds are much better.
One trouble with this country is the way stacks of bullshit and empty rhetoric reinforces our national myths.
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: The failure of baby boomers to retire on schedule is a major problem for genXers like you (and me). I had profs at law school who had retired from private practice, and in the 1960s it had taken them 6 years or so to be made partner. Half their cohort had not made it. Now it takes over a decade, and only on in ten makes it.
My wife is in accounting. 20 years ago it took 10 to 12 years at most to make partner, in part because when partners hit the mandatory retirement age at 55, they really have to retire. Now a lot of people wait 15 to 18 years before being considered for partnership, and still there are partners who earn less for the firm than the directors who hold on to their positions until their mid-60s, and earn four to five times as much as the directors do. And since the business has been allowed to consolidate there is nowhere else for the directors to go. They feel like serfs. Rebellious serfs.
A lot of this has to do with structural changes in the economy – we, as a society, are a lot less wealthy than we thought we were. Still, amongst the professional class, there is brutal generational warfare that may well end up in the destruction of major professional firms. Over the next few years we will see a lot of major law firms collapse, because the next generation of lawyers feel no loyalty to firms that have used and abused them over decades.
Jim-Bob
Snuffy:
Can the snark, Snuffy. Please. Am I the first one to tell you that you should have had a plan before you committed seven years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to earn credentials for a field that’s already saturated? (If so, I should charge for my advice …) Did you have a plan before you went to law school? I mean an actual plan, not “Law School. ‘?.’ Profit!”
Okay, that was bit harsh, but take a deep breath and actually consider what I wrote. I know it sounds like a lot of Dale Carnegie bullshit platitudes, but I’m coming out of six months in the wilderness, getting fired-sized from a business that’s in the process of being Napstered (book publishing). I’ve figured out a few things in the process.
I’m sorry about your predicament. Please ignore my advice; you seem to have a handle on things.
/caring
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
Yep. If I’d figured this out when I was 18, I would’ve moved to Europe and gone to college over there. Oh, well, too late now I guess. At least my wife’s from Hong Kong, so if things get too unbearable here I have an easier emigration option than many others.
@Xenos:
Yes, that sounds about right. A large number of people from my graduating class no longer practice law. From what I hear anecdotally, they tried it for a few years, then encountered a glass ceiling (which is pretty depressing, for someone 2 or 3 years out of law school).
No idea what they’re doing now. A lot of them went back to school. It must be nice not having to borrow $100,000 to get a graduate degree. If I had a spare $100,000 lying around, I’d probably be back in school, too.
Janet Strange
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Well, I think it’s stupid to blame a “generation” for anything. You can group people in any number of ways and find that a slight majority fit some description you don’t approve of, but its really unfair to blame all the members of that group for whatever-it-is.
But if you’re going to play that game, don’t blame us over-50’s. It’s the “late-Boomers” and Gen-Xer’s who (by a slight majority) voted most heavily for Reagan – and still vote Republican more than those of us who are 50-65.
See the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graphics and related discussion here.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Jim-Bob:
Actually, yes. My plan was to become a lawyer, and get a job. I was told by everyone I spoke to that this was a lucrative profession, and I believed that bullshit. I didn’t realize how saturated the profession was, and I didn’t do market research. Sorry for being a stupid 22-year-old when I decided on this degree, and not having you as my career counselor in college. (They were worse than useless, but that’s a whole separate gripe.)
If by “have a handle on things,” you mean “clinging by the skin of my teeth to an entry-level position that pays so little that when I tell my law school friends what I make they wince in sympathy,” then yes, I have a handle on things.
When and if America ever DOES have major rioting and revolution, rest assured there will be plenty of overeducated, underemployed twenty and thirtysomethings to lead the charge.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Janet Strange:
Well, fuck whomever voted for Reagan, then, whatever generation they were. There. Happy?
I know. I’ve read that, too. I was born in 1978, so depending on which chart you’re using I’m either Gen X or Gen Y. I’d much prefer to be considered Gen Y, by reason of personal, anecdotal experiences that corroborate those poll findings to a large extent.
Xenos
Snuffy does not sound too bitter considering the situation. There is a whole industry built around fooling people to go in for law degrees, and we produce far more lawyers than we need. I went into it with my eyes open, and while I am not bitter I am disappointed in myself for not being more cynical and realistic about my own limitations.
Either way – Snuffy is generalizing here, and that is the critical point. It is not that that one generation is screwing another, but that there were a couple of generations raised in the understanding that education and hard work, if it did not equal success, would give you a fair shake at making a professional career.
This was never a theory or even a dream until the late 1940s. You could get a law degree in 1915, but unless you had the contacts that would get you a job after graduation you would be a fool to dedicate the time and money towards getting a law degree. Harvard Law School would not accept you unless you could show that you did not need a part-time job to get by while in school, and if there was some indication in your recommendation letters from established law firm partners and judges that they would be willing to employ you once you finished the degree.
Now we are going back to the old ways. It is taking a long time to come to grips with this, and since the fault line between what approximated fairness and exploitation falls along generational lines the blame tends to get applied that way too. Rather, we should be examine the ethics of a student loan policy and industry that takes a fair chunk of the best and brightest and condemns to a lifetime of undischargeable debt.
I would argue that this little tempest in the upper-middle-class teapot, which must seem like obnoxious whining to most people, is indicative of larger social trends. Specifically, welcome to the 19th century, everyone.
binzinerator
I don’t think you need a conspiratorial turn of mind to come up with that. It’s not too hard to see that’s where it’s headed and not by accident.
After sitting down with a financial planner, I learned I will have to work until I am at least 70 to maintain in retirement the same lifestyle I have now. I make just under 60k now (and I am supposedly in the prime earning years of my life), which is comfortable but does not bankroll an expansive lifestyle, and I could easily be bankrupted by a medical disaster or an extended unemployment. I could reduce the amount saved for the kids’ college educations, but as it is I can only afford to save enough to fund a third of the projected cost.
Choices. Work until I drop. Or kiss the middle class goodbye (gosh that was livin’ life large wasn’t it?). Or forget about giving my kids a chance to go to college.
I’m going to work until I drop, only I pray that when I drop it’s after I’m 70. I am very worried I could become too sick to work before that. The worst would be to not die quickly and linger on for years needing expensive medical treatment and drugs.
I know, I know, you Republicans and Free Marketeers out there. Be thankful I have a job. Be glad I have any money to put away for education.
But that’s just what the Banana Republicans want everyone to buy into. Just like they have succeeded in making it the fault of the guy who gets laid off. “If you had any value to your employer you wouldn’t get laid off. It’s your fault you couldn’t find a way to be valuable.”
I have actually heard that from some republicans (who were also MBAs, natch.)
Big Business
it’s none of your business
they call the shots
while you call the misses
so go hit your hot spots
steal a few kisses
but if you know something
you’d better pretend you’re oblivious
to Big Business
— Carmaig De Forrest
gex
@Steeplejack: And, to add insult to injury, many Americans are dipping into their 401k money (what little is left after the Wall Street fleecing) to make ends meet as their unemployment insurance fails to meet their needs. Which is when you not only pay the taxes you owe on those earnings, but you pay a penalty for using your own money for yourself. It’s basically a huge tax increase on the most desperate.
Don
jcricket beat me to it, but if you want to talk about being sold a bill of goods it’s not the 401k and self-determination that’s the horseshit, it’s the actively managed funds than under-perform and charge big percentages on top of that.
And we’ve known that since A RANDOM WALK DOWN WALL ST was published OVER THIRTY-FIVE years ago, seven years before 401ks became available.
My tin-foil-hat side can’t help but wonder how much the 401k system was driven by fund managers scared that ARWDWS would drive away savvy investors and looking to this as a source of new, less informed investment folks.
Personally I think the 401k system is still a good one; the biggest issue I have with it is the cost and difficulty of setting them up – I’ve worked for two small companies over the years who didn’t initially have them because of the overhead. When I worked for myself it wasn’t remotely reasonable.
That period in the middle 2000s was when my middle-of-the-road political leanings started their slide to the left. Despite endless claims of being the party of business, the entirely Republican controlled government failed to do anything to improve my access to 401ks or simply fix the IRA caps to something reasonable. I was offended by the (D) who denigrated the issue as being only of concern to the rich, but he could have been easily overridden if anyone cared to do it.
chopper
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
that’s not really much of a plan, more like a general idea. a plan would be knowing what area of law you wanted to practice in, who you’d want to work for, where etc etc.
this isn’t meant as a lecture – i had no plan when i chose my major. i figured i’d get a job somewhere doing something, which to be honest was pretty stupid. i just didn’t really care. luckily i fell into a decent job (engineering is better about that i suppose) but only really because it was at a time when those jobs were hiring.
gex
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: And this is where that top .1% with all the money laugh and laugh as they watch us eat each other for sport.
passerby
@gbear:
Happy 55, gbear of the Crab Tribe.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Xenos:
True. That is an inter-generational folly. That’s the American Dream, in a nutshell. It’s a total crock of shit. I’m going to encourage my children not to go to college- or, if they must go, to go in some other country, where the government will subsidize it and/or where they stand a chance of getting a job afterward.
They still restrict your work hours in law school. I had to sign a contract stating that I wouldn’t work more than 15 hours a week. It is what it is.
People without college degrees were working at Walmart with me (actually, that would be most people who worked there…), but they didn’t have the student loan payments. When you find yourself envying high school dropouts for having the ability to save more money than you do, something is very wrong with your life. That’s the future of this country. I’d advise anyone considering college, who doesn’t have a very well-thought-out career path in a profession with job openings, to get a job instead. Even if you’re making $9 an hour, at least you’re not pissing away $30,000+ per year on a degree you’ll probably never get to use.
gex
@Will: This is where some helpful glibertarian argues that you don’t have the *right* to have children. No, really, I’ve seen them counter arguments for paying people wages that will support families with that counter-argument. They just simply find money to be more important than people in every way.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@chopper:
I realize that, now. I was a dumb kid. Were you a knowledgeable expert on all things career-related when you were 22?
Then when you see me, you can say there, but for the grace of God or the FSM or whatever, go you.
@gex:
I know. I just didn’t appreciate getting spoken to like I was a complete piece of shit for wanting to have a good job with decent pay. I realize this is a system designed to get one half of the poor to kill the other half. Always has been, always will be. That’s Capitalism 101.
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: Did you know that when the baby boomers got student loans they could discharge them in bakruptcy? So not only did they pay much lower tuitions, and had much better job markets to go into, but if they failed they did not get blocked from relief in bankruptcy court.
Just thought I ought to stir up a little more resentment around here… it was getting dull.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Xenos:
No, I’d kinda forgotten that at one point in time, student loans could die in bankruptcy. When did that change, under Reagan? Well, both Bushes are really just the poisonous fruits of the turd-blossoming Reagan tree.
Fuck you very much, Reagan voters. Again. With a stick, shoved sideways up your asses.
KG
Scruffy – as a fellow lawyer, I’ll offer you this advice: take a look at doing contract work, appearances, doc review, and the like. It’s not the traditional practice of law, but it gets your foot in the door, and it gives you some sort of experience. If you know some sole practitioners (or small firms) hit them up (I got my current gig by doing some contract work for the firm I’m at now), or there’s the contract attorney services that you can sign up with. I’ve actually got more than a few friends from law school that had to do this.
I’d also suggest a book called “How to Go Directly into Your Own Solo Law Practice and Succeed: into the New Millennium and Beyond.” by Gerald M. Singer. Some good advice, even if it’s a bit out dated.
gex
@Janet Strange: I’m going to go ahead and ding the boomers for this one anyhow, thank you very much. They did a terrific job of selling glibertarianism to their offspring is all.
Boomers grew up in an era when the progressive tax rates in this country really were progressive. There was massive investments by government into transportation and education. I can’t tell you how many boomers told me that they earned enough in their summer job to pay for a year’s worth of tuition and board. I just graduated with $60k in student loans.
The New Deal regulations hadn’t been gutted. Telecom and other utilities were regulated. And all this lead to a strong healthy economy that allowed those boomers to go forth and get nice jobs with nice salaries. In turn rather than continue to invest in this country the way their parents did, they bought into the Reagan revolution and voted themselves tax cut after tax cut (with deregulations sprinked in for seasoning), while never asking for fewer government services, except the services that go to other people.
Now these guys can’t afford to retire because their retirement fund got obliterated and they can’t buy health care until that same evil government provides it through medicaid. I note that *now* these boomers want financial regulation and a public option for health insurance.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@KG:
Thanks. That’s good advice.
My other problem is I live in Vermont. This is not an ideal place to be practicing right now. My goal is to move to a major city and start over, probably doing doc review. Probably won’t get to do that for another year or two, though. If I wait four years, I can probably avoid taking the Bar exam again. (Or I could get reciprocity with DC now, I guess. But Mrs. McSnufflepuss doesn’t want to live in DC.)
Xenos
I was a kid at the time, but I remember there being lots of stories in the mid-’70s about people skipping out on their student loans just because they lost their jobs and went bankrupt or some unbelievably weak excuse like that. I guess it was an early version of the welfare queen myth, propagating by some shit eating conservative think tank that existed to promote the interests of the banking industry.
Now of course there was a terrible recession in the mid ’70s, and there were lots of people who had graduated in the prior few years who had no way to pay off those debts, but I guess the idea was that when the economy turned around they would be able to pay up at last. I don’t think the economy will ever turn around to cover the most recent generation’s debts. This may become a major issue over the next few years, because the social contract for people under the age of 30 looks increasingly like serfdom.
And as this is more and more clear, the higher education bubble could pop, hard.
gnomedad
I’m 56, and not working at all is not really a goal for me (for as long as I’m healthy, obviously). What I want is a) my job not to suck, b) not to be afraid to quit a shitty job for fear of losing my health insurance, and c) not to have to work 80 hour weeks as the only alternative to being unemployed. I think the current employer-centric health insurance model is a major contributor to b) and c), the latter because it creates a huge first cost for hiring anyone, and then once you’re on board they’d rather work you to death (even if it means paying you more) rather than share the work among more employees.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
Work till we drop?
Funny! I dropped a long time ago, and I am still getting up every day and going to work. And by every day, I mean every goddam day, since I am on call 24 x 7.
Dropping no longer gets you off the hook, it just makes you a little slower.
I have a one word description of what retirement (or the possibility thereof) looks like right now from out here in the middle class: Hell.
I saw a package of ordinary paper towels at the store yesterday, “on sale” for $10. Grocery prices appear to be on the rise again. Gas prices are taking the expected rise after a dip, I fully expect $5 gasoline within two years if not sooner.
Healthcare for people in my demographic is a cost trainwreck, and it is going to get markedly worse as boomers like me get older and sicker, unless serious reforms are enacted soon. And those cost increases will reach down into your demographics too, kids. Count on it.
The economy has wrecked the workplace, employers are not hiring, staff is doing double duty and getting by without needed equipment and other resources. Nobody is getting raises, everybody fears losing their jobs and their insurance along with the jobs, and everyone in my group wonders if the retirement benefits will even be there if needed.
Then we have to turn on our tv sets and watch insane Republicans talking about wanting a freeze on government spending, killing healthcare reforms, and worrying about whether gays are going to destroy marriage. (If they were smart, they’d promote gay marriage, which will put an end to gay sex once and for all, but that’s another story).
So, to escape from this pit of despair, we turn to the blogs for encouragement and possible activism, and … aw fuck, never mind.
People, and by that I mean most of you, are no damned good.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
We’re all fucked.
The masses need a new opiate, pronto. Religion is too boring, and they make me feel guilty when they pass collection plates around. Opiates are way, way too expensive. Bread and circuses defeat the free market. What should the next opiate be? (For those of us who can’t afford cable TV, I mean.)
If we don’t get a new opiate soon, we’re going to have some kind of revolution. Not Marxism, too discredited. We’ll have to figure out some kind of socioeconomic system that seems to work, since Marxism and Capitalism are both failures. Then, we’ll have to revolt until we get it. But figuring out a system to revolt for is the tricky part.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
@PeopleAreNoDamnGood:
This is my standard response when I encounter some mouthbreather frothing about the evils of gay marriage. It usually does a good job of shutting them up.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
Our generation really DID get the shit end of the stick, though. Our parents, and those of our parents generation (i.e. all of the people who were giving us the advice), had come of age at at time when just having a high-school diploma meant you’d likely get a decent job. A degree? You were practically given the keys to the city.
So to their minds, a degree automatically equaled career success. That’s all that they advised us to do, because that’s all they knew. And we trusted them, because they were the wise grownups.
And then in our generation, everybody and their dog started getting undergrad degrees, and a lot of them went on to get graduate degrees, and it became no special thing. And with a Bachelor’s degree, you no longer stood out. The only thing my B.A. has done for me is that it’s kept some doors from closing, in that it’s used as a way to weed out mass applications. My mom still doesn’t understand why, right out of university, the only job I was able to find was at a call centre. The ironic thing is that, as a nurse, she had always advised me against going into nursing, describing it as a thankless job with shit for pay. If I had ignored her advice and gone into nursing, I’d have been set — nurses are needed everywhere, and the average pay is over twice as much as I’m currently making.
Now our generation is planning on advising their kids to research the market and really do their homework before choosing a career path, and our advice will likely prove to be just as out-of-date and useless as our parents’ advice was to us. But the career counselors and guidance counselors really need to smarten the hell up and keep up with the times, because it’s their JOB to help these kids with their career path, and if they don’t know what’s going on out there, then they’re going to continue to screw people over.
As an example, my sister wanted to be a teacher. University of New Brunswick offered a B.Ed program right out of high school, which would have been perfect. The guidance counselor at our high school talked her out of it, saying that she should go get her B.A. first, so that she’d have “something to fall back on” if the teaching didn’t work out. Of course, he gave her no indication as to what courses she should take for her B.A., so she wound up not having enough of what they call “teachables”, didn’t qualify for the B.Ed program anymore, and by that point, couldn’t afford yet more university. She wound up working at call centres for years, when she could have been teaching, and would have been damn good at it.
liberal
@Janet Strange:
I was class of 1986 in college. My recollection is that the classes ahead of us were pretty liberal, or at least “acted” that way, and the classes after us dressed more formally and acted in ways that were “culturally” Republican.
Anecdotal only, of course.
Will
Scruffy,
While the states are not hiring right now, you might want to look at the public service student loan forgiveness program that’s in the pipeline. The states, feds and non-profits hire a lot of lawyers.
If you’ve got the kind of student loans that most law students graduate with, this might be an option. I’ve also head talk of a re-adjusted income-based replayment plan that can be entered along with the public service forgiveness program. That’s 10 years of pain and the possibility of doing something useful for society, instead of a lifetime of lingering debt.
As for all the “you should have had a better plan” folks… Frankly, screw you. I come from small town factory folk, who got their jobs shipped off to foreign climes after they paid for my college education. All I and people like me were told growing up was that college was the key to a better life and we made some poor choices, as we didn’t have the benefit of upper middle class connections and advice to guide us on our path.
Guess we should have been born well off.
Will
The mid-80s were the height of the “Republicans are cool” trend. Alex P. Keaton and such.
Forty2
HP does in fact have a match; however it was cut from 6% to 4% for those hired after July 2008. Maybe they rescinded it at one point but as far as I can tell, it’s back.
YellowJournalism
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: I think a lot of people accusing you of not making better plans do not understand the type of atmosphere it was when we went to college. It was the mid-nineties, the economy was doing extremely well, and we kept getting told that we would be vital to the work force because of all the people who would be going into retirement around the time or just after we started our jobs. Not to mention the fact that we were being taught to use all these new technologies that would make us even more valued as employees! (How I feel sorry for all of my friends who went into the tech field. Most of them had a lot of trouble finding work when they got out of college, thanks to the bust of the tech markets and outsourcing.)
I got out of journalism because of what I saw as an ethical decline and the fact that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. What did I do? I got into teaching. Was told that all these teachers would be retiring and we would be absolutely needed. What the reality turned out to be was that teachers retired, then were rehired in either part-time or full-time positions. This isn’t even going into the whole tenure issue. When a position became available, you had to fight, and the best course of action was to go into MORE debt and just go and get your masters so you had a leg up on the competition. That is, if it was financially possible.
I don’t necessarily blame the entire generation of boomers for this, though. I think the blame extends to too many groups to just point the finger at one, and I also see how hard it is to be retired and on social security when all your money has been sucked away for various reasons (helping kids out, medical bills, corporate fuck-ups, stock market, etc.). I worry about my parents because they invested their retirement and lost it. I see how hard my father works. It scares me for my parents, my husband and I, and for my children.
Waingro
I ‘d like to co-sign all of Scruffy McSnufflepuss’s posts, particularly about the fraudulent nature of a college degree. If college wasn’t so fucking expensive, then it wouldn’t be a big deal when it doesn’t lead to a lucrative career. But this is modern day America, and college does cost a shitload and it usually doesn’t lead to a great job, so yeah- good times, good times indeed.
I tell any teenager who will listen that they shouldn’t go into debt for a degree unless they have a very specific plan and have thoroughly researched the employment prospects.
Nothing infuriates me more than chin-stroking assholes who say that “college isn’t about getting a job, it’s about getting an education”. Well, no shit Socrates, but college also costs a shit-ton of debt that is impossible to discharge if things don’t work out. Anyone who advises a teenager like that without mentioning the very real trade-offs and risks deserves to get cock-punched repeatedly.
YellowJournalism
@liberal: I don’t know how long that laster after you went to college, but when I went, it was extremely liberal, in some cases almost hippy-like. I was actually considered conservative in my views in some classes.
YellowJournalism
@Waingro: But that’s exactly what our government is continuing to do. Even Obama’s main focus on education is getting people to get a university degree. We got rid of a lot of vocational education in the hope that everyone would be able to take AP courses. Even now, they’re pushing mediocre students to take AP because it’s a boost to getting your college degree. I know AP teachers who are frustrated because they feel it’s bringing the program down. (Unfortunately, many of these mediocre students have parents who want the curriculum dumbed down because “it’s not fair” to treat high school students like college students.)
Will
Thing is, he’s right. For the United States to remain competitive globally, it has to produce a huge volume of college graduates. The world is getting more complex and we need educated people to run it.
Which is why we are fucked. Europe, Asia and many developing countries subsidize or completely pay for their citizens’ college educations. As our national discourse is still Republican dominated, anyone who suggests doing this here is going to branded as unserious and too far to the left for the “American people”.
We’re not alone in this. All of the Anglo-Saxon nations – here’s looking at you Canada and the UK – are going to be in the same situation. With the rise of China and Europe as state-managed capitalist superpowers, I fully expect the next 50 years will see the free market powers descend into second and third rate status.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
Thanks for the link! I’ll look into it later today.
@YellowJournalism:
Yeah. Apparently, it’s our fault we couldn’t predict that dot-com bust, the Bush Administration, or the fact that the nation would be staring down at a second Great Depression by 2009. Not to mention the fact that every adviser I spoke to, from parents on up, strongly advised law school. My fault for not thinking every adult I’d ever had any respect for was a shameless liar.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
I’m just hoping the pendulum swings far enough to the left to save us this fate. I have some shred of hope that this country can pull out of its tailspin. If I didn’t, I probably would’ve left after 2004.
Yeah, I know I’m a sap. I was gullible at 22 and I’m still gullible at 31. But you have to believe in something to make it through life, and there are certainly worse things to believe in than America.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
Funny how people are different. One bible class at age 7 convinced me of that. First week.*
My reaction at the time was, you have to be kidding me. The only difference now, half a century-plus later, is that my reaction is “you have to be fucking kidding me.”
Don’t worry, we don’t have to revisit any old conversations. It’s just that your remark made me laugh.
*Of course, I grew up with some pretty interesting adults.
Waingro
Sort of. We definitely need more graduates in the hard sciences and even people who pursue a rigorous education in the other liberal arts like you would get at say, Swarthmore, Haverford or Williams. What we don’t need is more ‘College Graduates’ just for mere bragging rights. We don’t need more Hotel Management degrees or half-assed Sociology degrees from third-tier schools by students who feel pressure just to get a piece of paper.
Producing more college graduates is a bipartisan fetish among the managerial class in this country, but we should be very careful in defining what exactly we’re looking for a college education to produce. The Higher Education Industrial Complex may not be as pernicious as the Medical-Industrial or Military-Induistrial, but it definitely has it’s own distorted incentives and inertia.
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: You can’t expect all the laymen to know the details of the law school industrial complex. The ABA set up this system, and the sponsors behind the ABA are the ones who benefit from it. So blame them for fooling everybody else.
The sad part is that the better student you are, and the less sophisticated your folks are, the more likely you are to fall into the trap. It is pretty evil.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
Oh oh, agreement. Danger!
I myself have no doubt that the country will pull out of its tailspin … for a variety of reasons. I work hard to mock the people who declare it finished. The American Experiment has just passed one of its toughest-ever tests.
Poopyman
By “boost” I assume you mean “save money by graduating earlier”. A coworker’s daughter shave a year off her sentence with all her AP credits. That equates to a lot of dough.
Of course, the mediocre ones won’t pass enough AP to make that happen, bu they sure do clog up the system.
Will
A large part of this has been the disintegration of the high school as a learning institution. At this point, it’s possible to get a high school diploma without knowing how to read or do basic math. It’s worthless as a job vetting tool for any occupation that requires a self-directed and reasonably professional employee. Lots of people without a degree could do these jobs, but there’s just no way of knowing.
At its very minimum, a college diploma shows that a student had the ability to absorb some amount of reasonably complex information and the initiative to, mostly, show up for classes for four to six years. Between the two, you’ve got the raw material that can be turned into a reasonably competent employee.
This is skewed, but the alternative is fixing the public school systems, which would probably require a federal approach to education, much better funding and the removal of a huge amount of local control. I suspect it would be politically and socially easier and cheaper just to pay for the education of everyone who could get into college.
Xenos
@PeopleAreNoDamnGood:
Very true. And one thing history shows us is that when these times for testing come around, a generation or two get chewed up. Gen X is one of these, but I would not trade places with the class of ’14, ’29, ’41, or whatever it was in the ’60s when the draft really kicked in. I won’t even get into the class of 1860 or the economic struggles in the 30 year depression after 1873.
The greatest thing about being GenX is having Millennial kids. They are amazing, and the worst sort of disastrous career is worth putting up with to watch them grow up. The are so damn smart and such incredibly decent human beings. If we had not elected Obama the country really would not have been worthy of them.
Wile E. Quixote
Man, I have to say that I have no fucking sympathy for you Scruff, really, none at all. You were 22 years old when you decided to embark upon your law school experiment, 22 years old and apparently too gullible to ask questions such as “will I be able to get a job after I drop a zillion dollars on my shiny J.D?” Aren’t you supposed to be a grown up when you’re 22? Aren’t you supposed to take responsibility for yourself.
Then after getting your shiny J.D. you have this massive sense of entitlement that damnit! you deserve a job because you went to school for a long time and have a lot of debt. I dunno, you just remind me of too many entitled pricks I studied political science with who were either going to get rich by going to law school or the entitled pricks who thought that they deserved large quantities of money because they went off and got MBAs and then couldn’t find anyone who wanted to hire them.
No, your fault for not thinking for yourself and asking questions like “what happens if this doesn’t work out?” Stop blaming those adults, they no more saw the dot.com bust and the Bush administration than you did, oh, and by the way, when you made this decision you were, legally at least, an adult.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@PeopleAreNoDamnGood:
Yeah. I grew up Unitarian. What religion I was supposed to be varied depending on Dad’s mood that night and how much he’d had to drink. It ran the gamut from atheist to Catholic, with sidebars for reincarnation and God as a man-eating frog. (Matter of fact, he painted an interesting box called “faces of God,” in which God was a different species on each side.)
Interesting adult, but not totally and obviously untrustworthy as to choices of careers to go into to escape turning in to a blue-collar worker like him. He thought being a lawyer sounded better than being a pipefitter, and I agreed with him.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Wile E. Quixote:
Fuck yourself. What do you do for a living, asshole?
Janet Strange
@gex:
Who? Who bought into the Reagan revolution? I despised the man, and I was sick at what he and all of his Believers were doing to the country. There were tens of millions of boomer Americans who felt the same way. If you want to blame a generation, blame the Gen Xer’s, since a higher percentage of them bought into Reagan’s bullshit. But it’s stupid to blame the Gen Xer’s either, because tens of millions of them despised him as much as I did.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And this is exactly what makes me so sick about what’s happening to my students and my daughter’s generation. Exactly because I am a boomer and I know it doesn’t have to be that way. I grew up in an America where there was a collective understanding that education benefits us all, not just those who go to school. And we should all pitch in to pay for it, not just students and their parents. And all the rest of it you describe.
I used to get into to huge fights with the younger ones over at the GOS who insisted that it was unfair to ask other people to help pay for an education for someone else. They’d never lived that idea that we should all contribute to make the whole country stronger, to give everyone an opportunity. LBJ – Great Society.
(Not to mention that we could kill our economy by creating a generation that begins adulthood facing the choice between no college and crushing debt.)
I am angry at the Reagan voters – of all ages – precisely because I had it better and I know better is possible, in spite of the whining of politicians who claim doing the right thing is politically impossible.
But my real point is that whenever you identify a group of people and blame them for Bad Things and The Trouble We’re Now In, you end up with crap like Blacks were responsible for the passage of Prop 8, or 20-somethings are responsible for the world having to suffer through Bush’s second term because they didn’t turn out to vote in 2004 in as high numbers as other groups.
It’s dumb and unfair for two reasons – you’re blaming a huge number of people for doing things they didn’t do (see Blacks who voted against Prop 8, young people who worked their butts off trying to get Kerry elected) and you’re letting other people who are responsible off the hook (all the white people who voted for Prop 8, all the over 30’s who voted for Bush).
Encouraging the kind of thinking that leads to scapegoating of groups of people based on characteristics that they have no control over – race, sex, age, ethnic group, orientation, etc. – rather than their actual actions, can lead to very bad things. Always has.
Sorry for the rant.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Apparently, trying to achieve the American Dream= being an entitled prick
Fuck yourself, you worthless sack of shit. If I’m an entitled prick, then so is everyone else who’s ever gone to college. We all wanted the same things. Most of us didn’t get them, especially not in my generation.
EDIT: Directed at the asshole who accused me of sounding like an entitled prick because I didn’t know that the economy would crumble and that my law degree would land me years of working overnight shifts in drug stores and Walmart.
Will
You know, it’s us folks from the working class backgrounds who seem the most fucked these days. Our parents scrimped to send us to college, as it was the salvation. If we were good at it, we had borrow to go to grad school. Then – thousands of dollars of debt later – we learned all those life lessons that the well off had already imparted to their children.
Now, we get to be lectured by a bunch of losers who feel superior to us because they had the good sense to spend their 20s smoking pot and getting fat.
It is interesting, though, that the working class adults I grew up around were nowhere near as scummy as the ones that surround the well-off children. There’s something to that.
Will
I wouldn’t sweat it. Check out that guy’s blog for a laugh. Lonely, overweight loser with a lot of anger issues.
In his defense, he’s right. It’s a much better age for those with low standards and little ambition. Life is much cheaper when your largest expense is maintaining the Cheeto stockpile.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
Yeah, it’s sad. I mean, I guess it’s the luck of the draw. Could be worse times to be young- at least we didn’t graduate in 1941 or 1860 or what have you. But I don’t think I’m an entitled prick because I tried to rise higher than the working class. If that makes me an entitled prick, then every American ever has been an entitled prick, we’re a nation of entitled pricks, and people who don’t like that can fuck off to somewhere else.
Right now, I’d kill to be working class again. As it is, I work weekends at Best Buy to make ends meet. The wife works full-time, and I work 7 days a week, to make a combined salary that’s less than what my parents made.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
His blog’s annoying as Hell, that’s for sure.
Will
I like being a professional. My job is reasonably creative, my bosses don’t watch me like a criminal and there’s simply a lot more freedom in my life than my parents had. I like being well educated. I work in an environment where my graduate degree means something, so my advice is solicited and acted upon.
Having an advanced degree has made my life appreciably better. Plus, it’s fun to have that knowledge and discipline stuffed in my head. If nothing else, you can instantly bond with a lot of smart people who’ve had the same experience.
The downside is that my debt load sucks. It fucks up relationships. I’m not going to be buying a house or having children anytime soon. My car is older than my co-workers. The only way I could lighten it would be to go for the Ph.D., but that would just makes things worse in the long run.
And while I’m not counting on it, I have a strong suspicion that there will be relief sometime in the future. This is becoming a major political issue and a large drag on our society. The professional class is large and politically powerful and our generation is going to keep rising in the ranks with all this baggage, while dreading the same fate for our children.
Will
To expand on that a bit, graduate-level degrees are becoming mandatory for promotions to higher-level positions in a lot of places. Some employers will pay for this, but most won’t.
So on one end, you’ve got millions of middle and upper middle class professionals – i.e. the people who run things – choosing between seeing their career rot or being swamped with graduate debt. They also know their children are going to be faced with the same choices.
At the other end, you’ve got all these non-dischargeable loans forcing educated professionals who’ve been hit with illness or sudden job loss going into default. The student loan industry is another housing loan crisis just waiting to happen.
Something’s going to break and it’s going to happen before either of us hit our 60s.
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: If the economy was better I would say you are paying a VT opportunities cost tax. But I doubt it is much better elsewhere.
The year before I finished law school in Boston the employment rate upon graduation was 97%. For my class it was 45%, and that was five years ago. I am horrified to think what it is now. As an older student I at least had the benefit of seeing this play out before — a friend of mine who graduated from Vermont Law School in 1993 worked volunteer for the Suffolk County DA for two years before they deigned to give him some picayune salary.
Good luck, though. If you are living where you want to stay, and you can make professional contacts as you go along, then you are likely to see your way through this. Because others will give up before you do, and you can outlast them.
RedKitten (formerly Krista - the Canadian one)
The vocational schools are singing the same song that the colleges and universities were singing 10 years ago. After I got my B.A. and had to work at call centres, I decided that it was time to try a different tack, so I enrolled at the local community college for a 1-year Public Relations diploma. At the time, the NSCC was crowing about how everybody found jobs, and they’d do work term placements, and that you’d have no troubles whatsoever finding work in your field afterwards. Like a dummy, I figured I would at least have better odds finding something than with a general B.A. Well, turns out the market was saturated, because they had been enrolling so many students, and giving them the same damn promises, for the last 4 years running. Back to the call centres.
I’m now working in the PR field, to a certain degree (it’s one aspect of my job), but getting this job was more happenstance than anything else, and the irony is that at 34, I’m now making LESS than I was at the call centre when I was 21.
The only consolation is that I don’t have any student loans. University was a lot cheaper back in ’93, and my community college tuition was only $1200 a year. If I had a huge debt from all of this, I’d be really fucking bitter.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@Will:
Well, for our sakes, I hope you’re right. Maybe Obama will get around to addressing this issue eventually. It affects me more directly at this point in my life than health insurance does (although obviously, that’s a much larger issue for the nation as a whole).
@Xenos:
Thanks. I hope you’re right. I feel bad for your friend, I spent 5 months volunteering at the public defender’s office up here while I was working overnights in a drugstore. There are plenty of places looking to take advantage of the desperation, and milk some free labor out of people.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
It’s an odd feeling to see a line like this and then realize that it wasn’t directed at me. Sort of like an out of body experience.
;-)
Xenos
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: My friend ended up doing alright for himself. His family was old money if a bit down at the heels for the last couple generations, which he parlayed into marrying an heiress he had met at prep school. So there are always alternate careers open for those with the gumption to pursue them!
He is practicing criminal defense law, which is not making him much money. I know lots of old-timers who made good money defending bank robbers back in the 60s and 70s, but today’s criminals are apparently as broke as the rest of us. I did pretty well doing divorces until all my clients’ houses were underwater, and there was nothing but debt to split up by the time the cases wound up.
You can’t make a living providing services to the middle class – they are completely tapped out. Luckily my wife’s rather counter-cyclical career took off, so I am house-husbanding in the boondocks. I made it through school without much debt, but the opportunity cost (age 32-42 pretty much wasted career-wise) was steep.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
LOL, not sure whether I’m supposed to apologize or not for not cussing you out. :p
@Xenos:
Unfortunately, I’m already married, and the Missus is poor- so marrying into money’s out of the question. I suppose I could start playing the Powerball, but I don’t really feel like I can afford it.
Criminal defense is one of my main practice areas right now, too. The pay is absolutely abysmal, but it’s almost worth it just to get the chance to fuck over the cops when they fuck up and forget that this isn’t Soviet Russia.
Kilkee
Scruffy: Vermont is nice, but I think the legal prospects, slim as they are, might be better in Portland. Plus the ocean. Minus the mountains, really. And reciprocal admission now, if you’ve been practicing in Vt a few years.
tripletee (formerly tBone)
@PeopleAreNoDamnGood:
Fuck off, you fucking prick.
I hope that helps ground you again.
PeopleAreNoDamnGood
@tripletee (formerly tBone):
Thanks. Now we are back on track.
Ruckus
Scruffy
I’m almost twice your age and although I don’t have the college degree to pay for I also don’t have it to get my foot in the door. On my third career, second stint at self-employment because I didn’t see any other choice. The last 30-40 years have completely screwed up the “American Dream” for most of us, whatever your age. A good chunk of luck (or that fucking silver spoon) seems to be necessary to get “ahead” (whatever that means). I do think it was better a couple of generations ago but now to even get let in the door you need that degree. And as you pointed out coming of age in the 60’s got you a draft number/possible death sentence.
Even 30 years ago getting training for anything but a college degree/white collar job was hard to find.
I’m not sure that “American Dream” was every anything more than pure crap anyway.
Now as to that bit about telling the future, yours or anyone else’s, if you every figure that out be sure to package it and charge a bundle. And keep telling those who suggest that you should have been able to, to fuck off.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Thanks, Kilkee. I’ve thought about Portland, and really, the only reason I’m not working on moving there is that from what I’ve heard, the economy over there is even worse.
Thanks, Ruckus. It’s “good,” sort of, to hear that the American Dream was always a steaming pile of horseshit. I knew it was during the 1920s when my ancestors came over from Ireland and whatnot, but for some reason I was under the illusion that during the 1945-1970 period, at least, it was somewhat real. And yeah, you’re right, anyone who expects someone who’s 22, or even 32, or maybe even 42, to know exactly what to do with the rest of their lives, should fuck off and go pull their head out of their ass. Unless your occupation in life consists mostly of extracting money from your trust fund, it’s all luck and happenstance what you end up doing in the long run- “luck” being traditionally defined as what happens when preparation meets opportunity, but preparation, without opportunity, is a sterile and hollow undertaking.
kay
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
I’m going to offer you my advice.
Don’t move. Pick a practice area, you said criminal defense, and then focus on a particular court.
I chose juvenile law, because I did an internship and I get along with children. I wrote three letters to three county juvenile judges and told them I would take court appointments. One responded, and I’m still in his court three times a week. He was crucial. I met everyone else in his court. The other two judges came along later. That’s three courts. Learn the local rules, and be nice to the clerks.
From that I got certified as a guardian (we’re still in the same three juvenile courts, and by now I know everyone). I still take appointments as a guardian, both county and private. It’s about a quarter of my practice.
From that I got certified as a “collaborative lawyer” to broker parenting plans between unmarried parents who are battling (we’re again in the same three juvenile courts). I like negotiation, and I like drafting the agreement. I do “high conflict” plans.
Pick a court, pick a practice area, get into that court, and stay there.
I make a decent living. It’s not glamorous, but I love my job.
You’re going to be scary broke for at least 2 years, but you’ll do okay after that.
rachel
Wow, looking over this thread really brings home to me how blindly lucky I’ve been–and I’m not exactly raking in the big bucks either.
kay
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
I’m reading the advice I gave and it sounds like I had a plan, and I didn’t. The plan was the three letters.
After that….well, that was the entire plan.
It wasn’t seamless, either. One thing just led to another, but in a sort of chaotic fashion, although I did come up with the “three courts” idea, and that worked well.
Anyway, good luck, wherever you end up, I’m sympathetic to your plight, and the advice is worth what you paid for it :)