Boomers had it easier.

....And then they mostly couldn't be bothered to actually get college degrees despite how cheap they were, yet still ended up with good careers capable of supporting entire households with only one person working anyway.

Despite his cynicism, even Bernie manages to understate the problem here!

Just throwing out there, this was one generation out of however many to the dawn of time that was able to do this. And they did it on the backs of the hundreds of thousands of people that fought, starved and died to get unions established. For the vast majority of history, if you could work you worked man, woman & child because if you didn't your family starved. Then people fought for generations to get unions established and they finally did it and one single generation got the advantages of it before the next generation decided they didn't need no stinking unions as they were working white collar jobs and here we are. We're not standing together so we're falling together.
To be fair, the reason every job nowadays requires a college degree is because so many people went to college. Before that, the boomers were coasting on with barely a high school degree but they tought that by pushing their kids to get college degrees, they can help them achieve more wealth (and by extension, themselves). This combined with the fact that they basically directly contributed to the erosion of unions (it was a very common thing that an employer/union leader paid off by a company offered boomers a deal where they get a higher pension but it would not apply to anyone born after 2000 or something; of course they took those deals because they are the "me me me generation", who has the foresight of a hampster) and then they are deliberately oblivious to the fact that young people can't achieve anything career wise because they don't have strong unions backing them up. No unions, no better pay, no better working conditions, no guarantied good deal on pension and insurance, etc etc.
As a side note, in the US at least there is a reason many advise people to just learn a trade instead of getting a college degree. Trades are in high demand, has been for a good while and probably will be for decades.
You know what else changed? On-the-job training is now practically unheard of. The kind where the company invests in employees and their development.

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

Bernie Sanders, @BernieSanders

The Boomer generation needed just 306 hours of minimum wage work to pay for four years of public college. Millennials need 4,459.

The economy today is rigged against working people and young people. This is what we are going to change.

^{I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!}

I've been looking for work since losing my job in March. And all these lead-addled antiques keep saying, "nobody wants to work anymore." These people couldn't be any less attached to reality.
- I can promise you this: for every boomer who says something like that, there's another boomer who thinks that one is a douche.
Talked to a (old) boomer just yesterday during a BBQ. Everything from climate change denial to citing the Bible to .. I don't kinow, justify his hate of "weirdos" like gay and trans people.
But he did admit that young people have it harder than him and that he would not be young in our current time.
Finances aren't the only difficulty in life. It's not that simple and reducing down to just the financial aspect of life, while that aspect is important, is oversimplifying things. Don't forget there were tons of poor boomers too. Only about 1/3rd ever saw a pension. Plus, try telling gay boomers, POC, women, people with mental and emotional issues, etc that they had it easier. They weren't all middle class straight white men, and treating them as one homogenous group is disingenuous.
- Plus, try telling gay boomers, POC, women, people with mental and emotional issues, etc that they had it easier.
  Doesn't making necessities unaffordable affect all working class populations?
  I get what you're saying, and agree in part, but depending on where you are in the US, a lot of the progress has really only been superficial - and over the same time working class purchasing power decreased and social safety nets decreased.
  Economics is an easy point of intersectionality for the working class, because it hurts us all. We can unite around that instead of dividing ourselves from it. It even hits the boomers, and I think we're all aware that many of them are already skating on thin ice in retirement.
  There are no 'easy times' for some groups of people (and they deserve our utmost empathy) but I can't help but see it like this: Throw in a minority identity, or a neurodivergency, or anything else that already makes life hard on top of this late stage capitalist economy, and 2020s are right out of a dystopian novel. At least in my opinion.
- I'm (barely) in the boomer generation, and I have a daughter who is 25, so I see the situation she has compared to what I had. I also have boomer employees and coworkers with younger kids. The cost of buying a house and paying for education is for sure a lot higher now compared to wages, and those are big quality of life factors.
  One thing I rarely see mentioned in these discussions is the availability of a safety net. My daughter has had to have a fair amount of help from us, as have most of her peers from their parents, and that sucks, but the fact of the matter is that it's more of an option today than when I was young. Most of my friends have paid 100% of their kids' education, and many if not most have helped with housing in one way or another. That was less viable when I was young. I was lucky that my parents paid for my education, but that wasn't true for most of my peers at the time. When I left the house, it was made clear that there's no going back.
  I'm in no way trying to say we had it hard or harder, just mentioning that there are a lot of factors that go into the situation.
  Oh, one other thing: I really believe that the current high cost of education is at least in part intended by older conservatives. Today's conservative agenda relies on people voting against their own interests (it's amazing that poor Midwestern farmers largely support tax cuts for the wealthy - it's crazy). Making education something only wealthier people can afford and creating a giant media franchise that looks like news but is really conservative propaganda are two approaches to furthering that goal. We have to fix it, but there's a bunch of people who actively don't want to fix it because they're happy with the situation.

Bernie sanders screaming into the wind yet again.

Bernie i love ya but nobody is gonna do the things you say.

They are way too reasonable.

Isn’t that kind of defeatist?
I don’t really have a horse in this race since I am not from the US.
- It's more cynicism than defeatism. People from the United States have pushed for these kinds of common sense reforms for our entire lives and we still have nothing to show for it.
- First you say
  Isn't that kind of defeatist?
  Then,
  I don’t really have a horse in this race since I am not from the US.
  So, that's the thing: after you have lived here long enough and seen all this shit happen, it's much easier to have a cynical outlook on the whole situation.
  If you live in an area of the world where you feel as if you can actually improve things, I can kind of understand why you might be surprised.
  But, the US is kind of fucked.
- Lol i dont know what you mean really.
Reasonable?
- As someone who lives in a country where Bernie's political view would be considered far more right than left, yes. Reasonable.
  Imagine a politician with a good grasp of reality and actually wanting to improve the conditions for the people. Being right about all contentious issues for the past 3-4 decades... Then imagine instead electing an absolute narcissist moron who I would entrust with a single thing.

- Incredible. But what actually did happen to cause the wealth gap to suddenly and rapidly start to widen?
- I would love that! Can someone skilled in graphics software do it?

Can we keep the timestamp in when cropping a post from another website?

7:29 AM · Apr 24, 2019 for the record.

That is what we are going to change

Then do it! I feel like I've heard this for so long, from all the parties, and just nothing gets done.

Do you realize who tweeted that? Because I feel like asking Bernie Sanders to just "do it" is very unfair. He's been fucking trying for the past decade.
- I'll agree he is trying, but it's so little, so slow, the whole legislature sucks at making progress.
- I used to like Bernie , I think he talks a good game to get people in but can be counted on to take a dive.

Fyi A full time job is 2080 hrs a year (40hrs/wk x 52 weeks).

Just use 2000 hours. It makes the math easier, plus anybody who doesn't get (at least!) two weeks of vacation with their full-time job is a chump who needs to unionize anyway.
- Vacation, stat holidays, sick days, we can keep adding it all. I'm going to stick to 2080.
Not hard to pull off if the economy gets better
- Keep kicking at that football, Charlie

Sorry, Bernie's full of crap. He's deliberately twisting facts to misinform. He's using today's highest minimum wage to calculate paying tuition at levels of 50 years ago, and trying to imply that people only needed to work 306 hours THEN to pay for college tuition THEN. That's just not true.

When I was working during high school / college, minimum wage was $1.50 / hr. That works out to $459 for 4 years of college education. Tuition at public institutions in the mid '70's was $1210 / year nces.ed.gov That's $4840 for 4 years at a time when my comfortably middle-class father was earning $25 K / year. It was cheaper, but not by as much as Bernie claims.

Also, public colleges have always been subsidized by the state. You'd also need to look at the level of subsidy between then and now and whether we're choosing to subsidize less.

The Federal Reserve has more power to control inflation than the president ever did. Presidents can't control supply and demand, nor can they control how much Amazon, Uber or Walmart pay their workers. Why do so many people believe that the US president is able to raise or lower prices of commodities, homes or college on a whim?

The president appoints multiple people on the board of the fed. But that's about it. More to your point neither the fed or the president has any control left on the main causes of inflation. Principal of which is corporate greed. Every major market in the US is an unnatural monopoly due to the fact we stopped busting monopoly's. Corporate greed would not be an inflationary cause but since there is so little competition in markets they can conspire without communication. Neither the president or the fed have any levers in which to do anything about this realistically since half our legislation is wholly owned by those same companies that hold control over these markets.
Companies very literally trained judges through continued learning requirements to not fight monopolies. The only bar for a merger today is a single question "Will prices go down" companies lie saying "yes" then it gets approved and there is no recourse or follow up.
They further make fallacious claims like "Monopolies don't exist without government!" Which is a total farce perpetuated by the same groups. It's meant to have people vote against their interests. Monopolies are an inevitable consequence of capitalism. It must divide at a certain point or stagnate.
I'm confused... Did someone say the president controls this stuff? I don't see that in the original post.

This is very smart of him to use generational terminology to engage with young voters. He's looking at trends on social media. Maybe it will work for him. His main obstacle is that most democrats are moderate and don't have a problem voting republican if they think the democrat is too far to the left. Maybe engaging with young voters in this way can help him get over that obstacle.

It's always good to focus on buying power. I bet you would get similarly ridiculous numbers when valuing food or housing in some normalized work hours (doesn't have to be minimum wage, could be median income too).

Please, reformist social democrats like Bernie aint gonna be able to change anything, regardless of their intentions.

It's not minimum wage's fault, it's the government guaranteeing student loans. Tuition skyrocketed since then and has been out of control since.

Then with so many people being told "You have to go to college so you don't become a garbageman!" the requirements for most jobs increased as well. Manufacturing in pharma, for instance, I could take a kid out of middle school and teach him the job in an hour. Get fresh grads from college for a bachelor's degree and they still need an hour of teaching. But now the Bachelors is required for some reason.

Ironically, garbage man pays pretty decent for some minimal manual labor.

Except that's not the case. The GI bill alone (passed in 1944) put millions people through college who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do so and did so for decades and the price didn't skyrocket. Once deregulation happened the prices began to skyrocket.
Student loans were guaranteed way back in boomer days too. So that would be a non-difference.
- Sallie Mae wasn't even a thing until 1973. Literally not boomers LOL. Federal student loans were very uncommon back before the 90s even and applied to only a few different areas, not everything. It is incredibly clear that something happened in the early 2000s that caused the current fiasco, with both tuition and debt skyrocketing.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Tuition_cost_of_college.png

I think the only solution to this problem is subsidies.

Subsidies knowledge works well around the world.

I think subsidies got us here in the first place. When the government pays for stuff it drives prices up.
- Yeah that works best when they're combined with regulation of industry.
- Depends what you subsidize, if you subsidize the learning, the work, the tools, etc. You'll also have a lot of young people already committed, having bought their own tools or paid for much of their education etc already, who will feel that they've lost their advantage in the job market due to the subsidy, and others who need it who may not qualify, who will be in a major pickle. At this stage at least, there's no one size fits all policy

Dumbest take of the year.
Typical troll.

Not easier, simpler.

^ this tbhimofamilia. Back in the days, we didn't had folks shouting and asking for special needs just because of their skin color.

Try researching your masters degree in a Library using Microfiche. First reply here on Lemmy, just wanted to say "hello"

Yall go to college? Lol

6 class days away from finishing my Associates Degree at community college. 😁
Halfway to Bachelor's.
- Congrats. That probably feels really good.
  I never liked school. Authority, busy work, rote memorization. I always liked to learn ground up, with a purpose. And choosing what I wanted to be before i was even aware of myself felt limiting.
  Perhaps I'll go someday, I could never afford to not work, but today, I think I'd be pretty decent at school..go figure.
  tbh, I wouldn't trade my "education" for the world. If I could do it again, I'd do the same, i think.

Yes something needs to change and I feel you are seeing the real panic of the right as more and more younger people can now vote and are just pissed as everything they are doing.

People have been saying this since the 60s. Lots of young people are still conservative and many areas are still solidly red. I don't see a massive blue wave that garners a supermajority happening anytime soon.
- Actually, it looks like this time it might be true.
  Source
  Next is speculation on my part, but I imagine people are turning conservative more based on their wealth than their age. We saw a correlation between age and conservative sentiment because people tended to gather wealth as they got older.
  But that link has been progressively eroded, so people are no longer switching. Essentially the conservatives are killing the golden goose in their incessant pursuit of consolidating wealth.

Except we actually had to get a job and pay for everything before the semester started. There was no such thing as a student loan.

Did… did you seriously type that out, read it, and then think to yourself “yeah, this is a good argument!” Before you sent it? Because if you did that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all month.
...you do realize that we also need to do that, right? If you're in college without a job these days, you're basically going to be in debt for the rest of your life. I'm in my 30's, and I'm the only one of my friends to have paid off their loans, and it's specifically because I got my first job on my 16th birthday, and have been working non-stop since then. And I still didn't pay off my loans until I was 28. Sure, your generation specifically had to work a job for a year or two during high school to pay for college, but we have to that plus devote a significant part of our salary for the next decade in order to achieve the same result.
- Very well explained.
Are you sure you went to college? This is not the argument you think it is...
Except of course there were student loans. "Federal student loans were first offered in 1958 " - wiki. And before that the baby boom generation's parents had the GI Bill to get them through college.
- White people specifically had access to the GI bill benefits. Black vets were excluded for a long time.
Yeah... That's less than 8 weeks of work for all 4 years though, that's a good trade. You could work for one summer and pay for all of college, or work for each summer and pay for college, a car, some spending money and have stuff saved.
Vs now, where you can work full time all year and still be in the negative, by a lot. And of course if you do that then that's going to really hurt your studies.
So you had to work 77 hours to pay for your first year? Oooooh the horror.

College prices went sky high when the government started backing student loans, they should have never done that.

Except the government has been backing student loans since the GI bill passed in 1944. College tuition started growing in the 80s and really took off on the 90s and 2000s. So of the government backed loans didn't cause skyrocketing tuition for almost 2 generations, why did it start when millennials were just being born?