How ‘burritogate’ roiled the right — exposing a dangerous disconnect on affordability

Posted by Timely_Car_4591

2 Comments

  1. People should come away from this debate with a few things in mind.

    First, affordability is a real issue. It is not just because young people buy lattes and vacations that they can’t afford a home the way that boomers did. It is a complicated policy and economic issue.

    Second, young people need to realize they haven’t earned the life many of them live right now. There IS indeed some of this mentality among younger adults that they need a daily latte instead of a cup of coffee they brew themselves, or a burrito from Chipotle they had delivered and included all the extras on rather than making one themselves.

    Third, this trend among young people happens for 2 reasons. One is just ignorance or foolishness – being unwilling to struggle through tight times and failing to see that the comforts they had under their parents took time for their parents to earn. But another reason is a sense of giving up. I saw my boomer parents fall ass backwards into a career with no education yet provided a pension and significant upward mobility, putting them squarely in the middle class. I was told I needed to go to college to achieve what they did. All it achieved for me was debt. I made missteps along the way, but my parents made similar missteps and ended up fine. The biggest difference was I was told to take on this massive debt, and they were not.

    So put on top of that all the policy that many in that generation allowed to happen that have stagnated new home building and have bloated our government and inflated out money, not to mention all the divorce that has devastated so many people, and it reasonably looks like we cannot achieve what they did financially. So if I’m stuck in my financial situation and I continue to be unable to afford a house, and I might take the conciliation prize of an overpriced burrito once in a while. If I do that too much, then shame on me, but at the same time, if I don’t do it ever then it is abundantly clear that I don’t have what my parents had.

    This is true from many in my generation and younger even while many are doing much better.

Leave A Reply