I identify as Gen X even though I was technically born in the last week of the Baby Boom, and my generational cohort is taking a lot of grief from a lot of young people — by whom I mean anybody not of driving age when 9/11 happened. The rap is this: the older folks rigged the game and, to the extent they have gotten out of the way (Boomers being accused of selfishly clinging to power, prestige, and position long after their sell-by date), we have left subsequent generations an economic Schiff sandwich. Some of this critique is justified — those kooky kids today are right that they got served up an unprecedented set of obstacles and challenges to success. But us crusties have a point too: if you’re regularly dropping your cash on the proverbial $20 burrito, you’re doing money management wrong.
Basically, things fiscally suck for young people, but things have always fiscally sucked for young people, and the only way through it is through it.
When we hear younger folk complain how everything sucks, our usual move is to explain how things sucked for us. And things did suck for us. I was making $3.10 an hour mopping out the stalls at the Foster City Carl’s Jr. in 1981. I moved up in the world across the street to McDonald’s, where I slung Big Macs for $3.35 an hour. I got fired from Denny’s along the way for gross incompetence. And in 1988, I was pulling in $1,286.10 a month as a second lieutenant. I did freelance writing in the ’90s and wrote trivia questions and jokes for bar trivia games. I built a law firm after leaving a bigger law firm — I brought in Circuit City as a client as a second-year lawyer and got offered the same bonus of $500 as the associate they caught sleeping under his desk; my counteroffer was that I keep everything. What that meant was long hours, risk, and that everyone else got paid before I did. If we didn’t make money one month, I didn’t make money. And I was a reservist during that time, and my active duty did not count (one weekend a month and two weeks a year, my rear end — I ended up deploying for 16 months after 9/11, plus mobilizations for riots, fires, earthquakes, plagues of frogs, and O.J.). Eventually I was doing multiple gigs at once — lawyering, soldiering, stand-up comedy, and then writing, first for Andrew Breitbart, then here at Townhall, and also pumping out books (like my latest novel, “American Warlord,” out for presale now).
My purpose here is not to demonstrate the awesomeness that is Kurt; it’s to show that I worked a lot. I missed important stuff. I did not take vacations. I drove a used Volvo. It was 2005 before I paid off my student loans. I, and once I got married, we sacrificed a lot of the fun we saw friends having for our long-term goals. I did not buy $20 burritos; I still don’t. But one day, you get to a place where a $1,500 surprise transmission fix is not going to send you into a tailspin. So when I presume to offer my insights into getting your life into fiscal order, I did it. But none of this means young people today have it easy. It means no one had it easy. No one gave us anything, and no one is going to give young people everything. But none of that means that their complaints do not have some basic legitimacy. Take student loans — please. I used the GI Bill to pay some of my school, but I still walked out with about $70,000. It was doable; it never occurred to me that I should palm off the education that gave me the ability to practice law on the taxpayers. But the truth is that gullible young people got told that they should run up $200K to get a degree in Trans-curious Ecuadorian Interpretive Dance. And then they found that a barista’s salary — because they have no other saleable skills — isn’t going to service that debt. Imagine a six-figure millstone hung around your neck when you are just starting out with no upside that allows you to earn it off. Sure, they signed on the line that was dotted, but there is such a thing as joint and several liability; the system our generation put in place is liable as well.
And there are other problems. Inflation from the Biden era, along with the much smaller but still significant consequences of tariffs and Iran (both of which have a point, but require some sacrifice), means the dollars the kids make don’t stretch. We could go out in our 20s and get $2 beers; a couple of beers today is now over $20, and that’s unsustainable. No wonder the birthrate is dropping; the kids can’t go out and meet mates without taking out a mortgage. Moreover, there’s unfair competition, and our generation allowed it. We told the kids to go learn to code, to do the STEM thing, and then we allowed zillions of foreigners in on H-1B visas (or with no visa at all) into the country to provide a cheap serf class for the corporations. We priced the young people out of the market — I wasn’t competing with thousands of dudes from Goatbangistan when I was coming up. And a guy like me could get a job. DEI fascism has disenfranchised the male-identifying people o’ pallor; it was Jim Crow, except for honkies. And yes, rent and houses are expensive, but they were for us, too.
All this adds up to real problems for young people. There are some who think they should be living like their parents the day after they toss their mortarboard at their graduation from the University of College. Some believe that they can buy a daily $8.50 half-decaf half-espresso mocha macchiato every morning, and that’s just not so. When you’re young, you have no money. We didn’t; they won’t either, and to the extent they are bitching about that, well, talk to the hand. But our generation did do some damage, and we need to fix it. How? Here’s a non-exclusive list:
- End the student loan scam. Government-guaranteed student loans let colleges raise their prices because they don’t care — they always get their money. They need skin in the game to incentivize them to stop scamming credulous kids.
- Deport the illegal aliens and free up housing and jobs.
- No more H-1B visas. Why are we importing foreigners when our own young people are sending out a thousand resumes and getting maybe one interview?
- Totally eradicate DEI and demand pure merit as the only criterion. The deliberate discrimination against the non-diverse must end. The best should prevail, be it a cisgender male who makes Mitt Romney look ethnic or a lesbian Hindu of color with a limp.
But while we can fix some structural problems, here’s the hard truth. It’s always tough starting out. It always will be. You get nothing for free; if you want the Instagram fantasy life, you have to work for it. We get that there are obstacles. We get that there are challenges. We understand that there are things our generation did that need to be undone. But at the end of the day, what is going to make the difference is hard work and sacrifice. We need to get out of its way, but there’s no scenario where the younger generation gets anything handed to it. And that means maybe boiling up some ramen during your 20s instead of DoorDashing those $20 burritos.
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