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IPFS News Link • United States

Generation X Faces A Bleak, Impoverished Old Age

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Ted Rall

"Child poverty, employment, wages, home ownership, arrest records — in every category, this generation, the 13th since the American Revolution, is doing worse than the generation that came before," New York Times book critic Andrew Leonard wrote at the time.

"Indeed, for the first time since the Civil War, the authors of '13th Gen' keep reminding us, young people are unlikely to surpass the affluence of their parents."

Tellingly, the Times titled Leonard's review "The Boomers' Babies," as though their relationship to The Only Generation That Mattered at the time was their status as offspring. Which, equally tellingly, was incorrect. Most Xers' parents belong to the silent generation, which came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, not the boom.

As Gen Xers passed through each stage of life, Messrs. Howe and Strauss predicted, they would find themselves living through the worst possible time to be whatever age they happened to be. They attended secondary schools turned threadbare by budget cuts. As they entered young adulthood, the government restored draft registration and abolished financial aid grants for college. When "13th Gen" came out, the oldest Xers were in their late 20s, in the middle of a deep recession that decimated their job prospects and made it impossible for them to pay off their student loans or save for retirement.


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