Millennials Want to Own Stuff After All, They Just Can’t Afford It

Oct 9, 2015

RUSH: You know, we had a story, was it earlier this week or late last week? Might have been both. It was a story on Millennials and a popular misconception about them. I think it was earlier this week, might have been Monday. You know, for the longest time here, couple of years, the analysis of Millennials has been that they don’t want to own anything, that they are really and truly a genuinely different generation. They don’t want to own a car. They’re really not interested in cars, not like other generations have been. They don’t want to own homes or condominiums. They’re into the sharing community and renting and so forth.

It was presented to us in such a way that we were to think that these Millennials were entirely different cultural group of people and that it was unique in the sense that every prior generation, American dream, was to find is home ownership. Here comes a whole generation that’s pooh-poohing that. And every prior generation has always had its share of people that are car crazy. And here comes a generation that couldn’t care less about either of those, and they really don’t want to own anything.

They want to be getting around on mass transit or bicycles. They don’t want to plant roots anywhere. Their favorite thing in the world is Uber. And then we had a story, the contradictory story was Monday or Tuesday, that that was all wrong. That actually these Millennials are no different than any other generation. It was BS. The fact is they can’t afford cars because of the economy. They can’t afford to buy homes. Everything’s out of their reach in terms of ownership. They can’t get approved for loans. They’ve all got such student loan debt, or many of them, that owning anything is out of the question.

So it was largely a cover sentiment that was created by the left and the media to try to cast these Millennials as an entirely new group of people, anti-capitalists. That was what they were trying to make them out to be. Anti-traditional capitalist, anti-traditional America, pro-progressive, all this new stuff that was so foreign to everybody else, and they were so therefore light years ahead of us. They were a much cleaner people, a much better people, blah, blah, blah. It turns out all that’s smoke and mirrors. And it was all based on the fact that they can’t afford any of this stuff because of the Obama economy.

The difference is the Millennials themselves do not blame Obama. They don’t blame the government. They just think the country’s best days are behind it. They just think it is the luck of the draw. They just happened to have been born when America starts its inevitable decline because nothing can stay a superpower forever. They do not associate this decline and this malignant economy, stagnant economy with any government policy.

Well, now there’s an addendum to this, and this story is at Town Hall. It’s a column by Matt Vespa based on research that the Millennials are not nearly as monolithic as has been thought, and in fact younger Millennials, those between 18 and 20 are not nearly as liberal as older Millennials. The older Millennials we’re talking about are the ones that eschewed ownership, had no interest in cars, didn’t want to own a house, we were told, all this is BS. It was just the fact they couldn’t afford it, they didn’t have the money for it, they didn’t have the jobs, there wasn’t any job prospects. Look at housing prices where most of the country is just out of reach, even starter homes out of reach. So a lie was concocted. Well, they don’t care anyway. They want to rent, sharing economy. These are much more communal people.

It was an idea to try to present this generation as light years ahead of us intellectually, emotionally, much more well-adjusted, much more anti-capitalist, didn’t care about money. Turns out it was all a crock. And now we find out “Once Millennials get a job and start making between $40k-60k a year support for income redistribution, and other liberal policies related to fiscal policy, drops precipitously.”

“A Harvard Institute of Politics poll found something a bit interesting regarding Millennial voting patterns; younger ones aren’t as liberal.” Younger Millennials “aren’t as left leaning grew up in a different time, post-9/11 and in the midst of a major recession. Yet, once Millennials get a job and start making between $40k-60k a year –” that’s when they start, like everybody does, keeping more of what they earn, rather than being forced to give it away. And that attitude prevails on a number of other liberal policies. The bottom line is Millennials aren’t nearly as liberal when they start making money, and they’re not nearly as liberal as we’ve been told that they are.