The Biden administration keeps telling us that the economy is humming along, but for young Americans, things are getting worse. Huge percentages of young voters are being forced to move back in with their parents because they can’t afford rent or mortgages, and those young voters could have a big impact on this year’s elections. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: The Biden administration keeps telling us that the economy is humming along just fine. But for young Americans, things are really getting worse. Huge percentages of young voters being forced to move back in with their parents because they can’t afford rent or mortgages, even though they’re working two jobs to make ends meet. That’s the state of affairs moving into the 2024 election. How does it affect things?
Farron Cousins: Uh, it’s horrible for Biden. And here’s the thing. I’m on social media all the time and that’s, you got a much younger crowd, especially over on Twitter. But a lot of them talk about how sick and tired they are of hearing this administration tell them that the economy is doing great. Because when you look on paper, you look at the numbers, yeah, the economy is doing great. We’ve got record low unemployment, stock market going through the roof. Inflation’s coming down, prices still way up and a lot of that is price gouging. But get down on the micro level, not the macro level. Get down to the micro level. And that is where you start to see how bad the divide is in this country. Because if you’re somebody who’s over 40.
Mike Papantonio: Are you talking about age divide?
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I think it is bad.
Farron Cousins: If you’re over 40, you’re feeling the recovery, you’re doing pretty good. You’re under 40, it’s hell for these people right now.
Mike Papantonio:: Here are the numbers, Farron. Almost 30% of Gen Zers reported they can’t afford rent and they had to move back into their, with their family. It’s one outta three adults between 18 and 34 today are living with their parents. And that’s not that they just don’t wanna work. Some of ’em are working two jobs. And part of it is we’ve talked about before is you’ve got Wall Street coming in, buying up houses, buying up entire neighborhoods so they can jack the rents up. But this, I don’t see this getting any better. And I don’t know how you can in one side of your mouth saying, this is really good. We got a great economy. You have more movement right now with minorities and younger voters moving away from Democrats. They’re moving away. You’ve got, I think every week you’ve got some high profile minority leader coming out and saying, you know, we’ve all invested in the Democratic party. What’s it done for us? And so this is another one of those stories, isn’t it? And I think it has to be addressed. I mean, you can’t move into the election and put your head in the sand and say everything’s okay. Bernie Sanders, I think really handled it well, didn’t he?
Farron Cousins:: Yeah. Bernie came out recently and essentially, he said Biden has to change course. It was that simple, he said, he has to change the course. And of course, Bernie’s big thing is always these economic inequality issues. And this is where Biden has plenty of leeway to do something. He could go out there, hold a press conference in 10 minutes from now and say, look, we got a problem in the country where we’ve got Wall Street bankers moving into small town America, buying up all your homes and then charging you double what the rent should be, triple what the rent should be. I wanna make that illegal.
Mike Papantonio: And they could make it illegal. There’s all kinds of ways to stop that, but he won’t do it. The other part of it is with minorities, what you’re hearing is you’re bringing in tons and tons of immigration and what that’s doing is it’s driving down wages for us. They’re taking jobs that we used to be able to handle for $15 an hour, and now these folks are replacing for $5 an hour. So that’s the minority argument, and it’s affecting the way they see economics. That’s a big factor. The millennials, well, they’re losing ground to things like AI and technology. So I think it’s something you can’t just, you just can’t say everything’s okay and say, we can hold this position. We don’t have to address it. But you gotta be out there talking about it, don’t you?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And they want to talk about, hey, look at unemployment. It’s so down. Yeah. How about we talk about the number of people that are working two jobs. Let’s look at those statistics.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. 46%. 46% of Generation, I think it was Z’s.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So, more people have jobs, but more people have more jobs too. So there’s a lot of things. Overall are things better? Sure.
Mike Papantonio: What are the jobs they have?
Farron Cousins: They’re waiting tables still. And a lot of them.
Mike Papantonio: Service industry.
Farron Cousins: They’re service industry, they’re retail industry, and even those are already being automated. We’re seeing more self checkouts. We’re seeing, you know, they can’t get these office jobs that they went to school for, because we do have older generations that don’t have money to retire. So I gotta work until I’m 70 or 80. I can’t retire from this job and create an opening for the college graduate. It’s a horrible workforce.
Mike Papantonio: You know what the statistics show now? Used to be where we wanted, if you’re interviewing two people, one of them is 55, the other one is 25, you would lead, right around here we would also say, okay, we want that 25-year-old that’s got some ability and can be trained and can do a good job for us. It’s not just us, but the statistics show that people are favoring the older workers now. And so that’s another hit that the Z’s and millennials are having to deal with. I don’t see a quick solution to it.
Farron Cousins: No, I don’t either. Like I said, there’s things he could do. At the very least, talk about these things. Let’s stop pretending that the economy is working great for everybody. But if he doesn’t start getting out there and using that podium, using the pulpit, then he is gonna be in for a really sad year.
Mike Papantonio: It’s working great for millionaires and billionaires. It’s working great for millionaires and billionaires, but most generation Z and millennials are not billionaires and millionaires.
Farron Cousins: No. And they’ll never get close to it, unfortunately.
Mike Papantonio: Thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week, but all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week, so make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories every week that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers won’t let ’em. If they tell the story and it hurts the advertisers, the advertiser’s gonna pull the money, or their political connections are just so strong that there’s no middle ground. If they’re Democrat, they can’t talk about Democrats. If they’re Republicans, they can’t talk about Republicans. We, as you can see, don’t have that problem here. We’re gonna call balls and strikes regardless. Hope to see you next time.