{"id":6939,"date":"2014-01-28T10:02:23","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T18:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6939"},"modified":"2014-01-28T10:02:23","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T18:02:23","slug":"eating-our-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/eating-our-young\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating Our Young"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: Reini68 via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort \u2014 the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy Davis is not the poster girl for a resurgent misogyny. There is no epidemic of homophobia. Instead, if this administration\u2019s policies are any guide, we are witnessing a pandemic of\u00a0ephebiphobia<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 an utter disregard for young people.<\/p>\n

The war against those under 30 \u2014 and the unborn \u2014 is multifaceted. No one believes that the present payroll deductions leveled on working youth will result in the same levels of support upon their retirements that is now extended to the retiring baby-boom generation. Instead, the probable solutions of raising the retirement age, cutting back the rate of payouts, hiking taxes on benefits, and raising payroll rates are discussed in an environment of\u00a0apr\u00e8s moi le d\u00e9luge<\/a><\/i>\u00a0\u2014 to come into effect after the boomers are well pensioned off.<\/p>\n

The baby-boomer\/me generation<\/a>\u00a0demands what its \u201cgreatest generation\u201d parents got \u2014 or, in fact,\u00a0far more<\/a>, given its increased rates of longevity. The solution of more taxes and less benefits will fall on young people and the unborn, apparently on the premise that those under 18 do not vote, and those between 18 and 30 either vote less frequently than their grandparents or less knowledgeably about their own self-interest.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Social Security pyramidal scheme<\/a>\u00a0is merely the tip of the ephebiphobic iceberg. Currently student indebtedness exceeds $1 trillion. Many of these loans begin compounding before graduation and are pegged at interest rates far higher than parental mortgages. The cause of this tuition bubble is also not controversial. The prices colleges charge for annual tuition, room and board have for over two decades\u00a0far exceeded<\/a>\u00a0the annual rate of inflation.<\/p>\n

There were four causes of such price gouging of students. None of them had anything to do with offering better education for a more competitive price for job-hungry graduates. The first was automatic escalations in the amount of money students could borrow that would be backed by federal guarantees. If campuses hiked their wares at prices consistently twice the rate of inflation, they could assume that students \u2014 while in college \u2014 could qualify to borrow the needed sums. What happened afterwards was not all that much a concern of the campus, at least as long as it did not affect subsequent admissions.<\/p>\n

Second, the size and compensation of\u00a0the administrative class exploded<\/a>. Again, the reason why was not difficult to understand. Awash in federally backed loan dollars, hoping to lure students with high-tech and social amenities, and to indoctrinate them with race, class, and gender ideology, campuses created new positions from diversity associate provosts to technology gurus \u2014 all to oversee everything from rock-climbing walls to on-campus lectures and paid workshops from fashionable cultural icons.<\/p>\n

Third, there was\u00a0a radical bifurcation<\/a>\u00a0among faculty, a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy that rewarded fossilized tenured professors with reduced teaching loads and support for research, while cutting back on new replacement tenure-track billets and upping the percentage of units taught by pastime adjunct teachers. The new younger Morlocks did the grunge 1A work for their more rarefied and contemplative elder Eloi, and the students who paid for it sat through their lectures on fairness and equality.<\/p>\n

Finally, the idea of medieval exemption masked the oppression.\u00a0 Colleges were loudly progressive. Faculties sided with the Palestinians and Walmart greeters in the abstract, never the exploited part-timers in their midst. The noble poor were always distant, not the supposedly clueless lower-middle-class student\u00a0who went into hock<\/a>\u00a0to subsidize academic rants on equalitarianism.<\/p>\n

Little need be said about Obamacare. It is a third method of a vast redistribution scheme between the age cohorts, one that seeks to hike insurance premiums on the mostly young, healthy, and low paid or unemployed in order to subsidize the health care costs of the older, less hail, and more affluent. The success of Obamacare hinges on taxing a youthful cohort for a service it will rarely use in order to subsidize those better off who will use it a lot.<\/p>\n

This administration has added so far about $8 trillion\u00a0to the national debt<\/a>.\u00a0 By the end of its two terms, the national debt will have doubled in less than eight years. After the tax hikes and sequester, we may nonchalantly talk of deficits stabilizing at over $600-800 billion, forgetting that such annual red ink will in aggregate add trillions to the soon to be $18 trillion in aggregate debt. The tab can only be serviced by continuing virtually non-existent interest rates. For the present generation of toddlers, it is likely that the debt will only continue to grow and the eventual cost of servicing will soar. Interest rates will rise, and those who ran up the tab will be retired \u2014 while those who were not responsible for the profligacy will pay if off.<\/p>\n

In short, those now in the womb to the age of thirty will have to subsidize Social Security and Medicare for benefits that they themselves will never commensurately enjoy. They are paying far more for college than did either their parents or grandparents, and receiving less sound education and more dismal job prospects \u2014 with aggregate student loan debt that may match their mortgage obligations. Finally, the youth have no choice whether they wish to become as profligate as were their parents. Like it or not, for the next generation\u2019s natural lifespan, federal budgets will be reduced and taxes probably raised to service the enormous debt of others.<\/p>\n

The old notion of marriage in one\u2019s early twenties, two or three children by one\u2019s thirties, a two-car garage in the suburbs and a mortgage paid off by retirement is already a myth from a now forgotten age. Like the citizens of Petronius\u2019s Croton, the best bet for generations X, Y, and Z are an inheritance from those of an easier age.\u00a0 We can easily caricature today\u2019s youth \u2014 the prolonged adolescence in the garage or basement,\u00a0the tattoos and piercings<\/a>, the sorta, kinda going to school or part-time working that so often eats up one\u2019s twenties and early thirties \u2014 but the fault is more so their parents\u2019 generation who strangled and bankrupted the economy.<\/p>\n

In California, the boomers have virtually stopped natural gas and oil production in the Monterey Shale formation. It was adults that idled hundreds of thousands of acres of irrigated farmland that in turn put thousands out of work. The youth did not cancel new water projects and put California on the edge of disaster. The rich, affluent, and mature were opposed to salvaging a billion board feet of torched timber after the recent Sierra forest fires. It was always the smug older establishment that decided that they had enough money and security not to worry whether the less fortunate others might have commensurate opportunities. To the Bay Area grandee, one spotted newt or valley rat is always worth sidetracking\u00a0a few thousand youthful futures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, yes, there is something nauseating about the full, tenured professor indifferent to the plight of the part-timer, the Sierra Club attorney who cares nothing for the out-of-work young logger, and the pensioner with additional Social Security who assumes that the minimum-wage young fellow at Starbucks should always pay more benefits that he will never see.<\/p>\n

Symbolic of the many gifts bestowed by the baby boomers to the present generation of youth \u2014 aside from Botox and liposuction \u2014 was the new idea of the \u201cintern\u201d: an unpaid helot position predicated on the notion that the young and poorer might someday win a wage from the older and richer.<\/p>\n

How odd that President Obama, in his soon-to-be-infamous \u201cI have a pen and phone\u201d boast to bypass the Congress, claimed that he would act outside the Constitution to enact his agenda and help the \u201ckids.\u201d<\/p>\n

In truth, no administration in recent memory has done more to harm young people. Like some strange exotic species of the animal kingdom, we Americans are now eating our own young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 It is popular now to talk of race, class, and gender oppression. But left out of this focus on supposed victim groups is the one truly targeted cohort \u2014 the young. Despite the Obama-era hype, we are not suffering new outbreaks of racism. Wendy Davis is not the poster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[79,247,893],"tags":[845,1023,244,440,83,67,677],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1NV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6858,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obamacare-generation\/","url_meta":{"origin":6939,"position":0},"title":"The Obamacare Generation","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The ACA depends on Millennials picking up the tab -- as they already are for other entitlements -- in the midst of a bad economy. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 There are all sorts of time bombs embedded within Obamacare. 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Why are there\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "America's Future"","block_context":{"text":"America's Future","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/americas-future\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":692,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-american-helots\/","url_meta":{"origin":6939,"position":2},"title":"The New American Helots","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs \u2014 half free, half slave. The resulting helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship. 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