Young and Furious: Why Gen Z Is Rising Up Worldwide

Gen Z revolts as the system favors the old. Around the world, young people are losing patience. From Spain to South Korea, Gen Z is taking to the streets, furious that the global economy seems built for their grandparents, not them. According to the Washington Post, many of the protesters aren't radicals, they're just exhausted. They followed every rule, studied hard, worked long hours, stayed out of trouble. But now they can't afford homes, can't build savings, and can't imagine the stability their parents took for granted. In the US for example, a 28 year old trying to buy a median priced home today would need more than 80% of their annual income for a down payment. 80%. 50 years ago it was about 15%. Economists say the math is simple. Older generations benefited from cheap housing, pensions and rising asset value. Younger people face debt, low wages and skyrocketing rents. If policymakers ignore that divide, experts warn the next generation's rebellion won't just be online, it will be in the streets. And in fact, it is in the streets some places. It's not always about economics. And me and Kathmandu, they were protesting the taking down of social media. What's the real message? Policymakers around the world cannot continue to ignore young people and say these people don't vote. Let's just give more to old people because they vote. They can't keep doing that or we're going to see more and more unrest in the streets, whether it's in Kathmandu, whether it's in Korea, whether it's in Chicago. Let's dig a little bit deeper here because this, this is a big problem. No one has been more eloquent about this issue than the commentator Scott Galloway who points out that that old people are just systematically ripping off young people when they get elected officials to vote them. More and more benefits, more goodies, more tax breaks. It's younger people who proportionally are not getting the value and at some point are given all the debt and adding to a deficit on a yearly basis. Adding to a national debt at some point can cause a real drag on the economy and the old people will be gone by then, presumably, so they're not going to pay for it. Let's look at some of the stats and dig a little deeper. In The United States, US governments benefits go to senior citizens by 65%. 65% of all benefits go to people more than 55 years of it. My age, Social Security and Medicare now consume 45% of the federal budget. That's nearly half the top 20, house, 20 top 20% of households in terms of Income receive half of all tax breaks. Guess how many Gen Z people are in that percentage? Virtually not Gen Z and millennials combined hold just 8% of national wealth, despite forming over 50% of workers. Now you can say, well, T.J. of course older people who've been around saving for a long time are going to have more wealth. Yeah, I get that. But there is a real structural problem with our public policy system as it is now. Because there was a time certainly going back to the GI Bill after the World War II, where if you were just a guy, not particularly brighter than anyone else, no education, you went into the military, you came back, you helped win a war. Thank you. But you had so many governmental goodies. You basically could get a house, you could get a college education for no money or very little money. You showed up, you paid one debt to society, and now you were kind of set for a life. Now you had to work, you had to show up to the factory, you had to do other things, but you were able to own a home, you were able to have an American dream middle class barbecue in the backyard existence. Increasingly today that isn't happening now. Part of it is structural change in the worldwide economy. I get that there's competition from a lot of places that were just doing subsistence farming back in 1946. I get that. But a part of it is sheer government policies. And it's United States is the worst I'm familiar with. But certainly there are other countries around the world where the government goodies go to senior citizens increasingly who don't need it. Before Social Security, the poorest demographic in the United States was senior citizens. If you were a senior citizen In America in 1930, there was a pretty good chance you were really poor because you couldn't work hard anymore. And there was no other way of sustaining yourself. Other pensions were not really very common. There was no Social Security. And so the country decided we just don't want to see our parents, our grandparents dying, starving in the streets and dying. So they created things like Social Security. It was a good idea at the time, it's still a good idea. But at some point it goes too far. When more and more and more of the government's heavy hand, and I'm not anti government necessarily, but if more and more of the government's heavy hand is helping everyone over a certain age, things start to become very unequal. You get to the point where senior citizens are just vastly wealthier than their kids and their grandkids. And the big problem is the kids can't get on that first run, they can't get homeownership. They can't get out of student debt. Let's look at some more stats here. Median price to income ratio has ballooned from 2.2 in 1970 to 6.8 today. What does that mean? In 1970, if you took your income, let's say your income was $10,000 a year, that would mean you could buy a house for $22,000. These days, if your income is, say, $100,000, you need $680,000 to buy that house. That's the cost of the median house. So, again, I'm doing these proportionally. Not. That's not the specific number. The typical down payment of annual income today for a young person, or really anyone, is 81% of your annual income. 81%. In the 1970s, it was 15%. And a lot of millennials don't know that. But at some point, instinctively, they sense, hey, we're getting screwed here. Something is out of whack. Something just isn't fair. It's not working for us. And that's part of why we're seeing civil unrest around the world again. Every country is a little bit different. And in Nepal, the whole parliament was taken over, and parliament moved to discord because people were outraged at the government shutting down social media. So younger people want their forms of communication. They want some things that are new. But you know what else they want? They do, in fact, want a piece of the pie. They do want money for things like houses. They would like to get out of debt. So this is something policy makers are going to have to take into consideration, or you're going to see more pitchforks at the gate. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm blaming the victim here, but I'm going to go ahead and blame the victim. Young people, you got to vote. There is a reason senior citizens get so many goodies from governments around the world. They show up to vote. Now, it's not as sexy or glamorous as the big protest march, as burning politicians in effigy, as shouting chants in front of government. That's sexy. That's fun. That's the stuff of TV news and movies. You know what isn't really sexy and fun? Just showing up to the precinct and voting on election day and specifically voting for politicians who favor the policies you're looking for. Now, here in the United States, a lot of people complaining about, why are all of our politicians 180 years old? Well, young people, why don't you start running for office and stop voting for people who look like me. And I'm not nearly as young as our last president or our current president. Vote for younger people. Run for all. As much fun as it is to make fun of an old coot like Joe Biden, let's give him some credit. He ran for public office when he was 29 years old as a senator. And before that he ran for public office and he was, I think, 27 or 28 years old. So he was the young, youthful guard at one point, a long, long time ago. That could be you. So I want you to think about actually running for office some more stats that are important. Student loan debt exceeds $1,000,000,000,000. This is delaying home purchases for an entire generation. So one of the reasons younger people in America, this is more of an American problem than what we're seeing in other countries is the cost of education has skyrocketed. Well, well beyond any proportion you would assume from inflation. The other big advantage baby boomers at people like me is college education was really cheap. I had the benefit of going to one of the best exclusive colleges in the country, and it was, I think $8,500 a year, all in food, tuition, everything. So it's just not very expensive compared to kids getting hundreds of thousands of debt, especially they go to professional school. So this is rightly something a lot of young people are upset about and angry about it. It doesn't have to be this way. Our federal government is instrumental in a lot of policy on education because we fund so much of it. And it was there in lockstep when so many universities said, hey, we want to charge more money because we want to seem as fancy and as exclusive as other prestigious colleges that charge a lot of money. And so it just ratcheted up well beyond inflation. And it's not fair. First of all, it increases the value of my own education because other people can't afford it or get it. And it makes it unobtainable to so many others. And the people who do get it are saddled with this mountainous debt. Therefore you can't buy a house. Therefore you don't have the resources to run for political office. So all these things tie together as well. Other things. The OECD data show that young adults real incomes have stagnated, while housing and health costs have doubled. Youth unemployment above 20% in nations like Nepal also fuels unrest and migration. So that is not as big of a problem here in the United States, although we are seeing a rise of unemployment among young college educated Freshly minted college grads that we've not seen before. Economists are warning about geronto. Gerientocratic. Geriatric is really what we're talking. Old people. That's a fancy word of saying politics run by and for old people. And I just botched the word. But I think you get what I'm talking about. It threatens social stability and the benefits keep skewing. Older because in America now there is a whole generation, baby boomers, even some younger, where if you bought your home, you paid off your home, you were able to get a house inexpensive, your education was inexpensive, you got this momentum now you got money in the stock market. Stock market has exploded. Great. Everyone can buy the stocks, right? Well, wrong. If you are a young person today and you're saddled with student debt, you're saddled with massively higher health care costs than your parents and grandparents ever had to pay. And the cost of House is 10 times more than it used to be. Forget trying to put money into a 401k. It's all well and good for people like me to say, you know, put 10, 20% of your income every month into a low cost index fund in the s and P500 and you'll be rich by the time you retire. It's easy for me to say that. It's also true. The problem is there's nothing left at the end of the month for so many because of these societal forces beyond their control. And it's often a result of specific public policies that government officials and politicians have made. So I think we're going to see a lot more unrest for those of you who live in still functioning democracies. And when it comes to whether that applies to the United States, my big advice though is run for office or find public officials and candidates willing to support your own interest. Because senior citizens do it all the time. They all the time say, I don't care what you stand for in any other issue. If you don't vote to give me a Social Security increase, if you don't vote to give me more and more health care, I'm going to vote you out of office. It's very clear. It's focused, it's, it's tactical, it's also strategic. And it works for senior citizens. They get what they want. So if you're a young person, you got to start doing the same thing. And before you go out and start the big protest, because those are fun and it's exciting, you feel like a rebel. Get to the ballot box. If you're in a country that's still lets you vote. And I hope that come election time here in the United States, that still applies to us, but we'll see.