My younger sister is a freshman undergraduate at UC Berkeley. We spoke recently, and she was ecstatic that a laboratory on campus had offered to pay her $3,000 over the summer to work as a technician.
“Just $3,000?” I asked, honestly confused by her enthusiasm. I had made almost three times as much when I was a freshman doing similar work in a lab more than eight years ago. None of her classmates can find work, so she considers herself fortunate.
CNBC recently aired supposed experts talking about why Millennials aren’t signing up for health insurance that costs “less than a cell phone bill.” In case the answer isn’t totally obvious, it’s because they are poor, unemployed and have inherited an America that is not what it was for their chronically irresponsible parents. The Millennials will inherit the grotesque national debt, a jobless economy, responsibility for their parents’ extravagant public pensions and now with Obamacare, another requirement for them to subsidize the healthcare of the old. How great an irony it is that Millennials set this process into motion with their votes in 2008.
Recently, students at the University of Wisconsin overwhelmingly passed a referendum to raise segregated fees in order to pay for new and desperately needed recreational facilities. Never mind the plan involves shutting down the currently limited facilities during construction, or that very few of the students casting votes would actually benefit from facilities not slated to be completed until 2019 and 2022. The administration sold the plan to students under the premise that they would be “leaving a legacy for future Badgers.”
Millennials need to stop worrying about other people and about their “legacy” and start worrying about themselves. They have already been tasked with atoning for too many of their parent’s sins, from the climate to entitlements, and if they knew any better they would not continue to be the whipping boys that they are, so readily agreeing to take on more for the sake of others.
Jeffrey L. Jensen ([email protected]) is a fifth-year MD/PhD student at UW.
