How Do Boomers and Millennials Really Stack Up?

[Recursion]

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/how-do-boomers-and-millennials-really-stack-up/

As you know, I’ve spent a fair number of posts trying to persuade people that millennials don’t have it any harder than the generations before them. It’s really true, too. So here’s another bite at the apple.

This time I went to the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s exactly what you think it is: a survey that estimates how much people make and how much they spend. Here are the results for the most recent three generations, all of them at times when they were about 30 years old:



Overall, young millennials face higher costs than young boomers did, but they also have higher incomes. When you add it all up, millennials have about the same amount of money left over at the end of the year as boomers, but they get quite a bit more for their spending (cell phones, computers, internet access, better cars, videogames, etc.).

[MaryMagdaline]

1. Interesting

[TheRealNorth]

2. I think the primary issue

Last edited Fri Jun 28, 2019, 05:15 PM - Edit history (1)

Is that for those going to college, the costs of higher education have skyrocketed in the past 20 years and that any increase in income is lost servicing the loans they took out. I completed my schooling in 2003, and kids today are paying 3× the tuition at a public university over what I paid when I started. And we never had to worry about what was posted on social media or the internet affecting our job prospects when you are trying to find that first job.