The kids are all right...

By Dave Anderson

My generation is doing something right:

First from Josh Marshall summarizing a recent Rasmussen poll on the age breakdown of support for the unions in Wisconsin:

But when you look at this poll the pro-union / anti-union division turns heavily on age too. The younger votes have a far more progressive views on public employees, unions, collective bargaining and so on. That's not great news in general for Republicans. But for those of us with somewhat longer political memories this is actually pretty different from the way things used to be in the '80s and '90s. Back then it was older voters who tended to have more Democratic views on bread and butter economic issues. And it was younger voters who had more libertarian inclinations.

And now Dan Drezner on Millenial foreign policy instincts from a self-selected sample of yougn adults who are interested in foreign affairs:

[A]lmost 58% of the young leaders in this survey agreed with the statement that the U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should do more at home. Alternatively, 32.4% thought the U.S. had "struck the right balance" between issues at home and abroad," while only 10% thought that the United States should be more globally proactive. This isolationist sentiment among the younger generation stands in stark comparison to the Chicago Council's recent 2010 polling of older Americans, which found that 67% wanted America to have an active role in the world and only 31% thought we should limit our involvement, a near exact reverse. The older generation survey concluded that there was "persisting support for an internationalist foreign policy at levels unchanged from the past," but this perceived persistence is certainly not there among the young leaders (emphasis added).

I'm at the tail end of Gen. X or the start of the Millenials depending on which consultant you are talking to and what book they are trying to sell.

I'm 31, and I know that my cohort and the one following me have  been and will continue to be royally screwed if we keep on doing things the same way.

We are the ones who will be paying off the current death bets of our gray haired elites. We are the ones who will be paying for the deferred maitanence of infrastructure.

We are the ones who are paying for a crap-tastic labor market for entry and low-medium level jobs for the past decade and for the upcoming decade. 

We are the ones who are told that education is too expensive, but we can blow $100 billion dollars a year for priaptic wars, and $250 billion a year to soothe the feelings of our faux-Galtian overlords.

We are getting screwed by the ideologies and methodologies of our life times. Might as well try something different that worked at one time.