January 22, 2020
By: Linda Case Gibbons, Esq.
There's nothing more annoying than waking up and wondering who's feeding your polo ponies. Well, maybe waking up and realizing you don't have polo ponies.
Anymore.
Princes aren't the only ones who are disappointed that they can't have what they think they deserve. Millennials feel that way, too.
Last night Fox's Tucker Carlson said President Trump needs to offer "more" if he wants to win in November.
Especially to poor millennials.
"You may be happy with the state of the U.S. economy, but many young people aren't," Carlson wrote in the Daily Caller.
"The main problem -- the reason capitalism is increasingly discredited and socialism increasingly popular -- is that for too many young people, our current system isn't working."
It isn't? Seems not. And it's all because of student loans.
A survey conducted among a group of millennials indicated that half of those surveyed would be willing to give up the right to vote in the next two presidential elections if their student loans were paid off.
And this is while even Judge Judy believes the American economy is booming. She said so to a defendent on her TV show, and she's stumping for Bloomberg!
But apparently a booming economy isn't enough.Neither is energy independence. Or a tough tariff policy which brought back billions of dollars to the U.S.
Or everything else that Trump has accomplished.
Things that Obama didn't and couldn't do.
Millennials have college debt and think that entitles them to a high-ticket job on graduation day.
"'Go to college,' we tell them," Carlson said. "You'll be successful if you do.' But too often that advice is outdated, if not an utter lie. Many of our kids wind up impoverished by the experience, their dreams thwarted forever."
Uh huh.
What's right in his statement is, yeah, college doesn't guarantee anything. What idiot would believe it would?
What's wrong in his statement is that (a.) "Kids' shouldn't go to college if they can't afford it, and (b.) They sure as heck shouldn't go when they haven't got what it takes upstairs.
Like the Hollywood Huffman/Loughlin kids.
Unfortunately, this generation is nothing like the generation Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation."
These were the people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. The people who defeated Hitler, carried on, and never gave up.
"They have given the succeeding generations the opportunity to accumulate great economic wealth, political muscle, and the freedom from foreign oppression to make whatever choices they like," Brokaw wrote in his book, The Greatest Generation.
And this millennial generaton is certainly not like Washington's troops, like the soldiers who walked from South Plainfield in New Jersey to Staten Island.
They did. It's on a plaque in a park in South Plainfield.
What's missing in Tucker's analysis is that there can be too much of a good thing.
Too many $5 dollar Starbuck's lattes. Too easily available $800 dollar iPhones.
Too good a country. Too good a president.
Tucker says millennials can't get married, buy a house, and can't afford to have kids because of college debt, but that isn't true. It just that those things aren't easy to do.
In reruns of the TV show Cagney and Lacey, Mary Beth, an NYPD detective, and her contractor husband, Harvey, couldn't afford to buy a house, either.
Turns out the show originally aired in 1982, when 30-year-fixed-mortgage interest rates were 18 percent. Imagine. Today they are between 3 and 5 percent.
Huh.
The show's characters did get their house. And raised three kids.
They did it using a concept that is foreign to most Americans today. They bought it by saving for it, and they furnished it the same way.
What Tucker didn't say, and perhaps didn't think, is you can have anything you want if you live in America today.
Just by clicking a button. On your computer. On your phone. Dinner from Grubhub. A treadmill from QVC. Click, and they're at your door.
You just have to be able to pay for it. That's what Tucker forgot to mention.
Hold the line, America.
Where We Go One, We Go All.
Stay strong, Patriots.