20 Signs That The Poverty Explosion is Hitting Young People the Hardest

I'm not going to disagree with what you have posted. Obama has harmed our economy and he still will not own it. Of course there have been longer term trends such as free trade that have hurt us as well.

The economic situation varies with location. In central Arkansas jobs aren't hard to get, especially jobs suitable for the young (entry level jobs). There are also plenty of professional jobs, but they're going to people with experience. College educations are good, but experience often trumps education. Education plus experience is even better.

To the young people I say that you need to find a job and work there for a couple of years. Not McDonalds either. At least get a warehouse or factory job or anything that can be considered a real job. No employer is going to give a good job away to some 24 year old that has never kept a real job for more than 6 months. If you're a college graduate and if you want to work in your field then your sacrifice may not be over yet. You simply MUST stay involved in your field because in six years your degree will be almost worthless for that if you have not yet gained experience in your field.

Do internships, volunteer, take a BS job that is related to your field even if only marginally. Sociology degree? Try receptionist at a free clinic or anything that involves the downtrodden. That may not seem like a match but it can be spun much much better than a job at McDonalds or some factory. Biology degree? Something as remotely related as working at a medical laboratory supply house can keep you in the game.

The point is that you have to work in some job that is marginally related in some way. In doing so you may find one day that you have inadvertently carved yourself a niche. Just because you got a degree doesn't mean you're guaranteed a job with a $30k+ entry level pay. This has always been true and it is more true today than ever before.

Yes, the economy sucks and there will be more hardship and more losers today than in the past. Still though, for the ambitious and competitive young people there is still opportunity if they just don't give up and keep their eye on the ball.

This may have been prudent and applicable in the 80's my friend, but there is no way to live below 30k a year in the here and now.

Yes there is. It involves no $100 a month cell phone bill. It involves beans and corn bread. It involves driving an uncool car around that is paid for. It does not involve eating out, $100 North Face pull overs, or $200 a month weed habit.

I know because until a couple of years ago my family of three was living on $24,000 a year as I tried to put my own degree to work. It worked out, but not before some serious hard times. Now our household income is $38k and my wife is in nursing school. She'll be done in a year and our income should easily exceed $60k. Not great, but not too bad for a family in their early thirties.

We've seen some real hard times, though.

I get it, I'm actually 46 years old. My husband I had 4 children in 1995 and made 12K that year, and still managed to get by, eventually buy a house. That's when the "american dream" was still possible. Now my husband owns his own business and were fine, still living month to month, but fine. My children however don't have the same luxury. The idea the harder you work the farther you get is out the window. All but one of my kids is on their own and that is only because of how I raised them. Unfortunately, it's not month to month for them, it's hand to mouth, and no hope for improvement. The only one left here is my oldest son who no matter how hard he tries cannot find a job, and he is a general laborer !!! He has two children to support, and $10 an hour just barely pays for his car, which is in such bad condition it can't be inspected, and the gas he needs to get back and forth to any temp job he may find.

It's just not the same anymore.

By the way, I'm talking upstate NY .... not much left to save here.

Great advice from Anonymous Coward. Great. Our young people are hitting a brick wall built from the unfulfilled expectations that they were taught. The days of a guaranteed job that goes with a college degree are over, at least for now. We will see which of our kids survives and even thrives in a desert of jobs. It's almost like when our country first started and there were no guarantees of any kind that anyone would survive. Some didn't, but the ones who did set the stage for an explosion of opportunity for the ones who came after. The hardest job for these responsible young people will be fighting against what we have become and where we are being led, which is a society that rewards people for doing nothing, contributing nothing, and expecting everything to be given to them.

It's definitely getting worse. Of all the people I know who graduated college a couple years ago, the only ones with decent jobs are the ones who moved to New York City, but they spend their entire income on rent. It's impossible to get ahead. The only way to really have a good shot at making decent money is to either go to school for medicine or a trade. I wish I had known that before I went to college. I'm thinking about what trade to learn, cause if I have to work at a farm for another year doing brutal manual labor for a little over minimum wage I'll lose my mind.

Poverty is good I fell less evil with no money I can't purchase pointless crap I don't need I feel like I am killing the planet less now.

Yes it is, it has been obvious over here for at least 5 years, since before the shit in 2008, but that made it much worse. a few years ago I was claiming JSA(job seekers allowance) and over half the claimants I saw there were in my age range, say late teens to late twenties. I think it is because all through my life at school college/uni was made out to be the most important factor of all, and apprenticeships/vocational qualification’s were made out to be second rate. Now we have thousands with degrees in media studies or something equally pointless, wondering why they can't get jobs. With many larger firms laying off experienced professionals these professionals are taking jobs they wouldn’t have before, jobs that would have been starter jobs for the 18-25 year olds. I believe it could be partially intentional, instead of training up natives the jobs are exported for a duration then disappear. Maybe they want a massive army of unemployable, but physically fit people ready in ten years time, when the crisis of an unbalanced age demographic really bites, employ all as carers, paid out of the pensions of those they are looking for. Perfect way to make back that pension shortfall, have old people use their pensions to pay family members to become full time carers, and the government can go on with the plan of reshaping the country to fit the global agenda.

Jayzuss is that how much those cost ? I have like 10 of them for the family snapped up at thrift stores for 4 bucks each , hardly worn.

You are touching on an important point, which is learning a trade. 10 years ago not going to college and becoming a plumber meant you were a second rate person. People who fixed or built things started disappearing from America 25 years ago. The usual lament was "I can't find anyone to fix my washing machine." I remember reading years ago that the business that makes more money per square foot was a shoe repair store. What our displaced/unplaced college grads need to do is Google "Best paying jobs in the trades." Pick one you sort of like, learn it, do it and keep you and your family safe for the years coming, which will be tough ones
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Last Edited by Mr. Weird on 12/21/2012 09:08 AM

30K is living in luxury if you're young, single and childless.

yeah in 1989 it sure was

Gonna be funny when all those wildly,sick cheering Penn State football fans graduate and realize that they are balls deep in debt and no jobs around....Go ahead and cheer now clowns!

But...weed is the best motivation to work harder....(for young singles obviously-if you have kids, quit drinking, smoking, gaming or anything else that takes food from their mouths or money from their college funds.Give up coffee,underwear and socks for 18 years if you have to.)



Teens that use cannabis may function better than teen tobacco-users, and appear to be more socially driven and have fewer psychosocial problems than those who do not use either substance, according to a Swiss survey

Read more: [link to www.foxnews.com]

It varies with location, but basic needs can be met for under $20k a year. $8k for rent, $3.5k for car insurance, fuel, and maintenance, $2.75k for food, and the balance for utilities and clothing. Of course this doesn't include health care costs, but for healthy young people health care isn't much.

A couple earning $10 each and working full time will bring home more than that even with health insurance being deducted. Sure, they have to share a car and they won't be rolling in expendable income, but you have to start somewhere.

Is is really fair to compare today to those years where our economy was flying higher than reality? Let us compare today to the 1970s or early 1980s. I can remember the early and mid 80s and I remember what it was like to be poor.

As a child I got 2 or 3 toys at xmas. I wore hand me downs and second hand clothes and nothing else, we ate beans and cornbread about 4 days a week, we had more powdered milk than fresh. At one point we had no phone, no cable, one old clunker car, and we lived in a raggedy mobile home. My dad was in trade school and worked at a factory. My mom stayed home and raised me, my sister, and a garden.

They kept on keeping on and by the time I was in high school they had a modest new home, two new car payments, and every kind of junk food known to mankind.

I say grow some balls kids and accept the fact that nothing is easy. Times will be hard. I know few people young or old who didn't experience hard times. Scrounging pennies for food and gas, borrowing $30 from mom and dad just to eat for the week, riding a bicycle to work, doing shit work just to make ends meet....all of these things are normal. Few people have ever been secure before their thirties. If you think that when you're 24 that you are supposed to live anything like your parents then you are a moron.

All this said, it is true that times are particularly bad right now. I'm not saying they aren't. I'm sure my late grandfather who came of age during the depression as the son of a Texas sharecropper would laugh his ass off if some kid with a $400 phone, dressed in a $400 outfit, with a $500 laptop, and 5 year old car came crying to him about how hard it is.

Still is in my neck of the woods.

I agree, except that isn't the case where we live. Again I would assume it's geographical.

Everything is relative. My parents lived through the depression in the 30's and I remember 2 stories she told me. My brother always got ear infections and had a real bad one, with high fever. My mom took him to a doctor, and when the doctor asked her how she was going to pay him, she took off her wedding ring and handed it to him, which was the only valuable thing they still had. He threw it back at her, told her to leave, saying that this isn't a pawn shop. Second story was my aunt, uncle and cousins moved in with my family, to save money. One morning they found that there was only one nickel in the house and they flipped it to see which of the 2 men would use it on the street car to go downtown to look for a job.

Millions of Americans got through it, scarred for life and vowing never ever to be in that position again. My parents never were. When WW2 started, my father got a job in a defense plant and pulled the family out of the hole they had been in. I think that stories like this are going to start appearing in our country pretty soon, and we will all, including the young people, find out how tough they are. I'm betting that most of them will come out of it better people than when they went in.

Last Edited by Mr. Weird on 12/21/2012 11:12 AM

I live on very very little money. Eat out twice a month, no weed habit I have to pay for, my car is 12 years old, and I'm bone thin just about

But I have NO DEBT!! I'm happy about that. I'll grow my life further another time. While I'm able to survive I'm just going to grow myself to prepare to grow in more difficult times.

Your problem is, you need to get out of NY. There is no future there. Move to the South. There is still an economy here and jobs.

The construction and laborer industry is shot cause of the hispanics driving down wages. I love all people but the Government has recently in the past decade, allowed free flow over the border and even encouraged it, it seems to have been intentional.

Actually my husband has a successful (knock on wood) HVAC business, and we can't leave. Unfortunately, business is dependent on the economy, and NYS HATES small business (workman's comp, corp tax, etc, etc ). He can't afford to hire anyone, even our son. I've tried to encourage my son to move south, but it would be a blind move. Everyone he knows is here including his children. Probably not the best for them.

But thank you, I appreciate your advice. I have 1 child who has moved to Mass, another in trade school for construction in RI. Even with a partial scholarship to RPI there was no certainty of work afterwards, but student loan debt was guaranteed, like you, we came to the consensus that a trade is far more important in this day and age.

We plod a long. My only point being, I absolutely agree with the title of this thread, and to say the economy is improving is flat out propaganda to appease the hopeless masses.

ESPECIALLY NY. Migrants are being shoved into trailers all over the state, working for pennies, and living in squalor.

I wouldn't go South. I'd go to Wyoming/Montana, anywhere that private oil companies are drilling and recovering oil, where there are jobs waiting to be filled. It's almost like we are re-living our history, where immigrants left the crowded decaying East Coast for the opportunities in the golden West. Just Google the states that are NOT controlled by Democrats/Liberals. Those are the bankrupt ones. Go anywhere but there.

For one person you can easily live on 30k or less. Whole families are doing that now. It just takes planning and self-control.

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Until people are forced to give up their communication devices and electronic toys
they update every few months... there is no economic doom.



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no, today it still is.

agree. the north is way too expensive.

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TS66 posted: " there is no way to live below 30k a year "
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People can and do... those who know how are better for it.



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yes, that is an option as well. if you are single(or at least have no kids) then the sky is the limit. go for it.