Why can't we all just get along?

books:


	• Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead Tamara Draut Doubleday, 2006 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 58 reviews view larger image
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Marcia Clark Ghostwriter

Does anybody remember Marcia Clark? Anyone? Marcia Clark?

In case you've forgotten, Marcia Clark was the assistant district attorney who prosecuted OJ Simpson. Of course, we all know what happened in that case: OJ, despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, was acquitted thanks to the prosecution's sloppiness and tactical errors (which Simpson's all-star legal team famously exploited). And so it is with Strapped, Tamara Draut's effort to clarify the extent of economic oppression beating down Americans born since the '70s. Now surely Marcia Clark didn't really ghost-write the book, but Draut makes her best impression -- despite overwhelming evidence to work with, Draut too fails to state a convincing case.

Draut begins logically enough, setting forth her criteria for so-called adulthood: basically moving into your own place, getting hitched, and having a kid. Draut hypothesizes that, due to rising costs combined with stagnating wages, it's getting tougher and tougher to pull these things off without winding up indigent. Consequently, she explains, Gen Xers and Millenials face a lousy choice: either live with your folks longer, put off marriage, and skip the kids -- or take any of those plunges and pay with (your own) poverty.

Draut's argument is not a difficult sell -- for anyone who's seen a health insurance policy, a tuition statment, or a child care bill in the last six years , intuition alone gets you half the way. Anyone who's ever gotten a pink slip might as well sit on Draut's own choir. As the US economy continues to morph from diamond to a pyramid, it's just all so darn obvious - and here came Draut with the book one hoped would provide some real-world examples and tie it all together so nicely... Nope.

Draut's first problem is she kills herself with bad examples. For instance, Draut says car repairs and grocery bills have more to do with Gen Xers' credit card debts than airline tickets and keg parties. Great point, something I, like most 30-year-olds, can empathize with myself. But then instead of lining up case studies of minimum-wagers and college students putting brake jobs on the Visa, Draut offers up fancy furniture shopping sprees and flights to distant weddings. Huh? Remarkably, Draut couldn't even manage one single convincing case of a young worker getting crushed under the albatross of student loan payments - an amazing failure, since on a trip to her local laundromat Draut undoubtedly could have turned up at least one or two or twenty people making $35,000 a year and owing student loans in the high five-figures. The nadir was Draut's willingness to entertain the financial gripes of a couple pulling down $160K per year. Sorry, but there's pretty much no such thing as poor on $160,000 a year, unless maybe a serious crack habit is involved. The people voted for GWB out of pecuniary self-interest, for chrissakes. Yes, Tamara, I'm sure it must be awful to have a "jumbo mortgage;" about as awful as having the slowest horse for your polo match. Why, oh why, did you put them in the book??

Draut also disappoints by ending the book with a series of policy recommendations from some NYC think tank. Her material is gate-crashing stuff, after all. If it weren't for a (highly defensible) pre-occupation with concerns about war, environmental destruction, and other foreign policy issues, Gen X'ers could really be lining up in the streets and insisting on major domestic reforms like single-payer health insurance, affordable child care, preservation of Social Security, free college education (or at least tuition rollbacks and interest-free student loans), etc. But Draut blows smoke. All she has to offer are small ideas - tax code tinkering and realigning of appropriations priorities, couched in an anti-partisan polit-speak. I guess Draut's writing for moderates, whatever a "moderate" is these days. So sad.

I still recommend Strapped for those Gen-Xers out there drinking the "personal responsibility" Kool-Aid, who bought into the whole "American Dream" nonsense, the education = job = prosperity myth our culture's been pushing ever since Mr. Drummond sent Willis & Arnold to college. Maybe that was true for a while, but we're back to the gilded age. It's all about your parents' money in today's America, and if you don't know that, you might as well be out searching for the real killer.

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Taking charge on our own

With student loans, auto loans, mortgage loans, personal financial commitments and obligations, it is no wonder that young people have an extremely hard time coming ahead.

Without the serious backing and funding of goverment, student loans today are lacking and extremely competitive making college entrance too expensive for many high school students. Without college education, young people working today lack serious firepower to compete in this corporate war and place themselves in serious financial disadvantage if they can only get dead-end jobs with minimum wages. Instead of investing billions in the latest weapon technology and new military bases, our government should instead invest in cultivating the young people of today and make education as prevalent and affordable as possible.

I think it is high time for the Generation X to be *extremely* financially literate as any wrong financial move today could bring disastrous finanical repercussions down the road. With no social security to fall back on when we retire, the current uncertain economy(jobless recovery?), stagnant wages, sky-high housing price, continuous bombardment of buy now, pay later commercials and marketing strategies, we are in for a potential financial deathtrap.

Some of us are beginning to realize that we ourselves should plan for our own financial futures as there will be no relying on our companies (pensions are gone) or our goverment (social security - privatized or not are unreliable). These recent years, investment books are becoming the new IT book, like 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' real estate investing book becoming a household name in the investing world. For Generation X, regardless of salary level, it is ever more important to set aside some money to do some personal investments and increase earnings potential like investing in the stock market (open an etrade account is a start), starting a small side business (lots of books on starting a small online business on ebay) or even participate in the crazy real-estate business (lots of materials/books on real-estate investing). If we are relying on just our monthly paycheck to pay our bills, living paycheck to paycheck, we could never get out of this vicious loop, unless we get out of our comfort zone and take charge of our financial life by investing. ( Think small. It could start with only $100 for investing).

Strapped is indeed a good book that brings a lot of serious issues to the surface (once again) and reconfirm a lot of things that are wrong in America. But it is like an exhaustive exercise-list without answers at the end, so we ourselves have to find solutions to these issues as no one will be more interested in your future than you.

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WAKE UP, KID!

This is a very valuable book - for two reasons. On the one hand, it provides a general overview of a series of myths about the USA. On the other hand, it shows the actual reality behind those myths, and how this currently affects young adults' lives.

Myths, incidentally, are "something that many people believe but that does not exist or is false" (according to the dictionary).

Throughout the book, the author defends one of the greatest modern myths, the American Dream - which should be attainable to everyone, whatever your background. Draut argues that "American values" are all about building a just society, where everybody has "equal opportunities" to make it to the celebrated "middle-class". In this context, college education should be available for everyone - being the first stage in a process of "upward mobility" for the masses of underprivileged Americans. They should be "rewarded" for their "hard work" by being allowed to attain all the "amenities" of middle-class life: a stable and well-paid job, enduring security, a comfy home with garden, happy children, guaranteed retirement. All this, preferably, somewhere in the big city (or suburbs), with access to all the "cultural stimulation" and "career opportunities".

After painting this picture of the ideal life, the author shows that the "baby boomer" generation had a much greater chance of attaining all these goodies and pleasures than their children, the "generation X", will ever have.

Of course, only some baby boomers "made it" to the middle-class - since inequality is inherent to any (industrial) society, and the USA sure have thrived on all the poor and huddled masses welcomed (and kept) as cheap labour throughout the centuries (a practice that has continued in full force with globalization).
But Draut does have a point when she claims that the ones who THOUGHT they were already middle-class or just a step away from it are now confronted with continual obstacles. The middle-class is not taking any more newcomers. In fact, it's even kicking out many of its members.

Is this really so surprising? Or was it all just one grand illusion anyway?

After looking at all the neat promises incorporated by the American Dream, it would be adequate to actually confront the desert of the REAL. Draut's book is here very helpful.

Through comparisons between "baby boomers" and "Xers", interviews, statistics, examination of public policies, and a historical overview of major socio-economic changes, the author shows what today's young adults are actually achieving. Instead of the dream, they basically have to content themselves with Junk.

College and university education remain easily accessible for the higher classes and basically inaccessible for the lower ones, because of high fees - so much for equal opportunity. In order to attain even a low-quality college degree, most young adults end up indebted and spend the next decade or so of their lives trying to get rid of the debt. But since all they can get (mostly) are temporary and not-all-that-well-paid jobs, their debts keep rising instead of shrinking: they have to pay high rents in packed cities - and often resort to their credit card for daily expenses (groceries, car-repair, etc).
If young adults manage at all to keep a job long enough (even though most get no health security - and have to struggle to save a few cents for retirement), they "decide" to buy a house, thus adding nicely to their debts, since they are living pay check by pay check anyway Then come the children (even though the parents hardly manage to feed themselves), which are also part of everyone's dream - and a whole ordeal begins: mum doesn't have the chance to do the basic caretaking of a newborn without risking her job, the kid has to be put in the hands of strangers before it has recovered from the shock of birth, the parents can't afford to stay at home for a day when their children fall ill, and the bills naturally keep piling up (and now mum and dad have to start saving for junior's college education).

Young adults who have reached this point in their lives - and are lucky enough not to have lost their job in the meantime - are often disenchanted. This surely wasn't what they hoped to achieve with adulthood!

Quite understandably, Draut - who apparently still believes in the myths - is offended about the course of events in the USA. She tells us that American society was supposed to "embrace collective purpose over individual gains" - even though a capitalist system must necessarily thrive on individualism (at best sustaining the "collective purpose" of corporations and such) at the expenses of all the others.

In this context, someone is in fact STILL "making it": the CEOs and the "ultra"-rich, the big corporations, the credit card companies and banks, the government's military campaigns and space projects. The losers are just about everyone else. Which is simply part of the game, really. The new rules, such as globalization, deregulation and automation, have made it utterly impossible to continue on the supposedly "upward" path of the baby boomers.

So in the end, the good old days of "prosperity" for the "little people" could be regarded as little more than a bubble - which has just burst.

The author therefore sadly concludes that "the dream is slipping through our hands". Which is what dreams are supposed to do, anyway. The only obvious "solution", then, might be to WAKE UP. Reality sucks, but it's still the only concrete thing out there. It is also, arguably, the most unpleasant one - so no wonder that so many people have preferred to believe in a fable.

The problem is that in this case, as even Draut acknowledges, "the joke is on you". Look out, kid.

(And you might actually want to show this book to your parents and such - since chances are that also they haven't noticed yet that the myth is going down the drain, and might blame YOU for not "achieving" what isn't up for grabs anyway...)