Tag Archives: Youth

News

How public sector pensions force children to pay for the prosperity of adults

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

People retiring from the private sector need to save £250,000 to buy pension income equal to the national minimum wage – currently, £12,646 a year – or a total of £518,000 for a pension equal to national average earnings of £25,900.

These are among many eye-stretching facts in a new analysis of how unfunded promises to pay index-linked pensions to public sector workers are way beyond what most private sector savers can hope to achieve – and how these debts will burden children who have not yet left school.

The Intergenerational Foundation (IF) think tank used freedom of information requests to find out that 78,000 former public sector workers enjoy pensions of more than £25,900; and more than 12,000 get more than £50,000 a year. Three quarters of the latter are doctors and this index-linked income is irrespective of any private work or savings.

While many public sector workers pay into pension schemes, benefits usually outstrip employee contributions and the difference – or deficit – must be funded by future generations. Taxpayers’ total liability for public sector pensions, according to the report: ‘Are Government Pensions Unfair on the Younger Generation?’ is equivalent to £45,000 for every household in Britain and totals £1.2 trillion or £1,200,000,000,000.

An IF spokesman said: “This demonstrates the true scale of pension apartheid in the UK with news that 88pc  of public sector workers are currently entitled to pensions related to their final salaries, which are typically the most generous type of pension, compared to just 10pc of workers in the private sector.”

Don’t be fooled – this sort of thing happens in the United States as well, where teachers and government workers live high on the hog today and pass the bill to their children, who will be forced to pay for it all tomorrow. Is that fair?

News

Survey: young people losing their Christian faith in record numbers

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From the very liberal Washington Post.

Excerpt:

A growing tide of young Americans is drifting away from the religions of their childhood — and most of them are ending up in no religion at all.

One in four young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion, according to a new report from the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.

But most within this unaffiliated group — 55 percent — identified with a religious group when they were younger.

“These younger unaffiliated adults are very nonreligious,” said Daniel Cox, PRRI’s research director. “They demonstrate much lower levels of religiosity than we see in the general population,” including participation in religious rituals or worship services.

Some of them will return to their faiths as they age, “but there’s not a lot of evidence that most will come back,” added Cox, who said the trend away from organized religion dates back to the early 1990s.

The study of 2,013 Americans ages 18-24 focused on the younger end of the cohort commonly known as the “Millennials” or “Generation Y,” which generally includes young adults as old as 29. Interviews were conducted between March 7 and 20.

Across denominations, the net losses were uneven, with Catholics losing the highest proportion of childhood adherents — nearly 8 percent — followed by white mainline Protestant traditions, which lost 5 percent.

Among Catholics, whites were twice as likely as Hispanics to say they are no longer affiliated with the church.

White evangelical and black denominations fared better, with a net loss of about 1 percent. Non-Christian groups posted a modest 1 percent net increase in followers.

But the only group that saw significant growth between childhood and young adulthood was the unaffiliated — a jump from 11 percent to 25 percent.

And this is very interesting:

An overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants (68 percent) said they believe that some things are always wrong, compared to 49 percent of black Protestants, 45 percent of Catholics and 35 percent of the unaffiliated.

I’m a non-white evangelical Protestant, and I think that in general, evangelical Protestants are the ones who emphasize theology, apologetics and worldview integration the most. I think that any other church that wants to stop the losses will have to get serious about apologetics and worldview. It’s especially important for churches to emphasize that Christianity is about truth, to emphasize how we know it’s true (science, history) and to explain why some things are wrong and why Hell is fair. We just don’t have the requirements straight right now – too much emphasis on Christian culture and externals, and not enough emphasis on theology and apologetics and moral reasoning. And parents – not pastors – need to take the lead in teaching their own children after church is over.

News

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

 The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

Opportunities for college graduates vary widely.

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

[…]You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it’s not true for everybody,” says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. “If you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college.”

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor’s degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. “Simply put, we’re failing kids coming out of college,” he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. “We’re going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow.”

That bit about getting a job so you know what you need to study. It’s important to get a job – any job – so that you understand what you are supposed to be learning in high school and college – what employers want! The next most important thing is to have a career mentor – someone to steer you away from subjects like English and ballet and into engineering and science. A trade school is another good choice: nursing or electrical wiring or something like that. Something valuable that employers need – that should be the deciding factor – what employers want you to do for them. Here’s a page listing degrees and expected incomes. Engineering, medicine and computer science are the three best fields.

I am still trying to puzzle out why young people vote for Democrats so much. I think that they have been brainwashed to think that making moral judgments is wrong, so they keep voting against Republicans who pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-family and pro-personal responsibility. That’s what teachers tell them in school – don’t have any moral standards, don’t make any moral judgments, let the government spend your money for you to be more “fair”, etc. So young people vote for Democrats. But voting for Democrats doesn’t just weaken the social fabric, it also wrecks the economy. Who do young people expect to work for when they keep voting to bash corporations all the time? Corporations hire young people. It seems stupid to vote against the people who want to pay you to do work.

Now that I think about it, it might be a good idea for social conservatives to be ready to make a case for free market capitalism and limited government, using evidence like this that shows how socialism fails to create economic growth and jobs. Even if people vote for conservatism based on fiscal concerns or foreign policy concerns, it’s still going to be helpful to social conservatives. We need to be like Paul and be able to speak intelligently to any audience on a wider variety of topics. Also, I think it helps social conservatives to be seen as competent in areas outside of social conservatism – it’s important to have a well-rounded worldview in order to not be perceived as being narrow-minded and ideologically motivated.