Sarcasm aside, I’m serious.
A survey of 4,000 people aged 18-30 shows that 51% of young women and 45% of young men regularly use credit to stretch their finances until payday. The report also found that a quarter of young people in the UK are constantly in debt.
When asked how young people made their cash last to the end of the month, one in five said they used their overdraft and a similar number borrowed from family. The next most popular form of borrowing by people in the age group was using a credit card.
One in 10 said they had used a payday loan company, although for parents aged under 30, this number increased to one in four.
The Young Women’s Trust, which commissioned the representative sample of young people, said many of those questioned in the survey also worked extra hours or skipped meals to make their cash stretch to the end of the month.
And guess who is to blame?
“Young women are more likely to be stuck on low pay and on zero-hours contracts, which mean they don’t know how many hours they will work each month and whether they will earn enough to pay their bills.
Eat.
The.
Rich.
-Shiv
File under “No shit, Sherlock”.
What really pisses me off is when people wring their hands about how young people aren’t saving enough for retirement… Then they ask “why not?”, and propose some new arrangement of tax breaks and incentives, or some new awareness campaign, or complain that kids nowadays just aren’t thinking enough about the future. Well, let me tell you, the reason that young people aren’t saving enough for retirement is not that they’re lazy and short-sighted, or that they find pensions too complicated, or that they’re insufficiently incentivised – it’s because they’ve got no fucking money.
Yeah… I just cannot see calling millennials “lazy”. The ones I know work two or three jobs.
Now, of *course*, I know one or two people who fit the description. But for the most part? I think the millennials are dealing with a raw deal in the best way they can.
That’s a bad case of capitalism, you’ve got there. Usually, once it latches into a host’s metabolism, it’ll kill the host by regurgitating shit into the host’s bloodstream as soon as it’s threatened. Unfortunately, you can’t just tolerate the parasite – they can grow to humongous size, and the host staggers around dragging this great big blood-engorged thing. There is no best response; the old remedy: burning it off with torches and prying it out of the body politic with a pitchfork – it’s satisfying but almost always leaves a corpse. It’s worse than cancer in terms of morbidity, but it’s also virulent and spreads aggressively. When ant colonies detect members infected with cordiceps the infected workers are dragged from the hive and killed far away, the draggers themselves never return. Humans lack the will to make an apropriately ruthless response and may die out as a species. Sad, but it can’t be allowed to spread.
@3 Marcus Ranum
Shit dude, that’s something out of a Greek tragedy.