Good Article from MSNBC.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38364681/ns/business-economy_at_a_crossroads/

Gen Y: No jobs, lots of loans, grim future
Millennials' delay in starting their careers could wallop long-term finances

"
They are perhaps the best-educated generation ever, but they can’t find jobs. Many face staggering college loans and have moved back in with their parents. Even worse, their difficulty in getting careers launched could set them back financially for years.

The Millennials, broadly defined as those born in the 1980s and '90s, are the first generation of American workers since World War II who have cloudier prospects than the generations that preceded them.

Certainly the recession has hurt young workers badly. While the overall unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in June, it was 15.3 percent for those aged 20 to 24, compared with 7.8 percent for ages 35-44, 7.5 percent for ages 45-54 and 6.9 percent for those 55 and older.

Among 18-to 29-year-olds, unemployment is the highest it’s been in more than three decades, according to a recent report from Pew Research Center. The report also found that Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are less likely to be employed than Gen Xers or baby boomers were at the same age.

Millennials are generally well-educated, but they have have been cast as everything from tech savants who will work cheap to entitled narcissists. The recession has pitted these younger workers against baby boomers trying to save for retirement and Gen Xers with homes and families.

Just ask Michael Barreto.

Eleven months was all it took to bring him from post-graduation autonomy back to his parents’ home in Apple Valley, Calif.

Armed with an undergraduate degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine, and experience from an internship, the 23-year-old Barreto believed he had a better chance than many of his peers to find a job. But more than a year after graduation, Barreto is still struggling to find employment.

"Right now I'm just trying to find any sort of full-time work that would allow me to live on my own and save money for the future," he said.

Like many of his peers, Barreto left college with roughly $21,000 in federal loans. (The 2008 average for college students was $23,000, according to the College Board.) Barreto's parents also took out loans to help him afford college.

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Despite landing a job at Panera Bread Co. to support himself while looking for a job as a journalist, Barreto drained most of his savings to pay for his living expenses. He was eventually forced to move home and defer his loans.

The high unemployment rate among young Millennials can affect them financially and psychologically throughout their careers, according to a report by the Joint Economic Committee.

“The 'scarring effects' of prolonged unemployment can be devastating over a worker’s career,” according to the report. “Productivity, earnings and well-being can all suffer. In addition, unemployment can lead to a deterioration of skills and make securing future employment more difficult.”

Many Millennials have sought refuge back at school from the worst job market since at least the early 1980s. Yet that strategy, too, can backfire as students incur staggering amounts of debt to pay for advanced degrees that might not help them out much in the job market.

Jordan Hueseman, 25, accrued roughly $100,000 in student loans at the University of Denver earning a bachelor's degree in international business and a master's in business administration. On the job hunt, he found his graduate degree sometimes hindered more than it helped.

“At one point, I applied to Whole Foods, hoping they might see some potential for me to move to some type of management position,” Hueseman said. “The e-mail I received from them said I was far too overqualified for any of their hourly positions and as such would not be considered for a position.”

Hueseman said that after one job application, he was told he should leave his degrees off his resume. Hueseman said he was tempted to follow the advice but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“It’s a personal thing for a couple of us and a bit prideful, but the idea we just spent five years — and a hundred thousand dollars for some of us — obtaining two degrees, to go ahead and wipe that right back off our resume in hopes of getting a $12-an-hour job at Starbucks would really be depressing,” he said.

Even if they did feel inclined to do it, they'd be competing for that job with their peers and with plenty of older jobless workers. About 15 million Americans currently are out of work, 45 percent of them for at least six months.

Competing against older workers with years of experience has put many Millennials on the losing end of job interviews. And while that's typical of past recessions, the long-term unemployment characteristic of this cycle is forcing many older workers to seek jobs that would have gone to younger workers in the past.

“The average length of unemployment now is almost like six months, which is an all-time high, so the longer people are unemployed and the longer they go without being able to find a job, the more willing they are to accept a job that’s lower paying or for which they’re overqualified,” said economist Marisa Di Natale of Moody’s Economy.com.

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Baby boomers also are delaying their retirement, adding to the competition. A quarter of workers postponed their retirement in the past year, with 33 percent of workers now expecting to retire after 65, according to a retirement survey by The Employment Benefit Research Institute.

If they do manage to get hired, younger employees are often the first to be fired in layoffs. And when Millennials do land a job, it probably won’t be as lucrative due to intense competition for jobs. That means that this generation’s potential earning power is likely to lag over the course of their careers.

Young workers who start off in a recession generally begin in lower-ranking positions and have difficulty shifting into better jobs the first 15 years of their careers, according to a study that looked at the experience of workers who launched their careers in the early 1980s.

Young workers on average lost over $100,000 in earnings over the course of their careers due to the recession, concluded the study by Lisa B. Kahn of Yale University.

When asked if Millennials will face similar income losses, Kahn said it’s somewhat difficult to predict but likely.

“There are a lot of similarities with this recession to the recession of the 1980s in that it was the biggest we’d seen since the Great Depression. It’s affecting educated workers, so my guess would be unfortunately, yes,” Kahn said. "

Last night's playlist

So I signed up for a show last night from 6-9 as I did not have a show this past weekend. I hope you had the opportunity to tune in. If you didn't here is the playlist from the show. If you have trouble seeing the image, click on it and then click on it again to zoom in. I hope you have a good week.

-b gross

Last Saturday's Playlist

Click on the image below for a higher resolution look.

Playlist from yesterday's radio show

A link to the playlist can be found below.


http://wxyc.info/playlists/radioShow?radioShowID=119240

Social Media and Free Speech

This is something which I anticipate will become a contentious issue, if it already hasn't been. Below is a link to a tidbit from the CNN political ticker which may serve to raise some eyebrows on the issue.



http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/06/how-is-social-media-impacting-free-speech-rights/?fbid=Q8mntHfOF5h

....

Things that are annoying: Part III

1. Freecreditreport.com


I guarantee that you are already aware that this company is annoying. Whether it is the annoying commercials or the awfully catchy bad songs in those commercials, chances are, this company has gotten on your nerves. You may have noticed however that these commercials have subsided and/or gone away completely. This is because of recent financial reform legislation aimed at helping consumers who have been targeted by unfair business practices.

This leads me to why this company is annoying on another level. First of all, the credit score that you would get from freecreditreport.com is not free at all. I know this firsthand. Three or so years ago, I signed up for it and had to pay a nominal fee to monitor my credit (which I opted out of completely). All I wanted to do was to know my credit score. Unbeknowst to me, under the Fair Credit Reporting act, every individual is entitled to one free credit score per year. It has gotten better since then. Under new legislation , if a lender or a homeowner has requested your credit worthiness via your FICO score, you are entitled to that score. For more information, visit the Federal Trade Commission website on the matter at hand.

http://www.ftc.gov/freereports


2. Neglecting to vacate liquid waste from the urinal

I am consciously neglecting to put an image of this annoying occurrence to spare you the inconvenience. If you had trouble deciphering the title of this annoying thing, it is not flushing the toilet and leaving stale urine hanging around. Some people do this consciously, out of concern for the environment and to save money, and some people do it unconsciously, because they are lazy. Either way, the individual who leaves this travesty leaves not only a host of germs in an already dirty place, but can stain, yes stain, the toilet at hand. It is also very unpleasant to use such a toilet when it is already used in the first place. With the marginal amount of money you would be saving from your water bill, you would probably have to spend that money and more on environmentally degrading bathroom cleaning products to ensure the stains and germs go away. All in all, this is an unnecessarily annoying thing. The opposite of Nike's expression on this one : Just don't do it.




3. Health insurance companies

According to a Reuters News Service article from last year, the lobby for the health care industry was set to spend half a BILLION dollars on lobbying for the year, not coincidentally the year in which Healthcare and Health Insurance regulations were being debated in congress. This just serves to add insult to injury for the millions of uninsured and under insured individuals in this country.






It begs the question: why couldn't this money have been spent on providing more member coverage and for adding members to providers? The recently passed health care overhaul legislation has sought to provide more coverage to more individuals, but who knows what could have been done if not for this lobbying money.



For those who do have insurance, you know that the process of having obtained it is tricky. It is typically through an employer and with unemployment hovering around 10 percent, getting this insurance isn't always an option. And if you get a job, if you have a break in coverage and/or a pre-existing condition, you will have to wait for a certain amount of time. Ironically these are the types of people who would need insurance the most. For example, if I have been unemployed and had say, diabetes for instance, I probably would be both up to my ears in medical bills and possibly even have suffering health as a result. It is not yet clear what impact the new health care reform law(s) will have in practice. What is clear however is the plain and simple fact that in America, this is annoying.

Last weekend's playlist.

Below is a link to Saturday's playlist from my radio show.

http://wxyc.info/playlists/radioShow?radioShowID=119129

What to look for this week on my blog...

• Things that are annoying part III
  
• Euphemisms Part I

Happy Monday!