We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.
That’s what politicians do all the time. They promise you something, they don’t provide the money for it, and then they kick the can down the road and pass on the bill to the next generation.
If the husband be a slave and the wife a free woman, the children shall be free like their mother. If the husband be free and the wife a slave, the children shall be slaves.
Louisiana was then a possession of France
We are at risk of turning over to the next generation a worse life than we have had.
I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
I think the biggest problem in the world is that we have a generation of young people, and maybe two, who don't think it's going to get any better.
Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we've stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.
Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.
The politicians are preparing a worse world for our children than the one they were born into…
To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.
My kids never had the advantage I had: I was born poor.
My generation could be the first in Hong Kong to be worse off than our parents.
I feel bad for the kids that are in school right now and the young people all across America who don't realize that the grownups who are supposed to be running this country are the verge of leaving them as the first generation of Americans worse off than the generation before.
The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.
As long as inheritance lasts, there will be hereditary economic inequality—not the natural inequality of individuals, but the artificial inequality of classes—which will necessarily continue to be expressed in hereditary inequality of the development and cultivation of intelligence and will remain the source and sanction of all political and social inequality.
One of the cruellest things of all is to have a huge deficit in this country, meaning that everyone's children will be expected to pay back for our debt today. That is unfair as well.
What's just about a generation of people who rack up government debt for their own health care and retirement - while leaving their children and grandchildren to foot the bill?
Under neoliberalism everyone has to negotiate their fate alone, bearing full responsibility for problems that are often not of their own doing. The implications politically, economically and socially for young people are disastrous and are contributing to the emergence of a generation of young people who will occupy a space of social abandonment and terminal exclusion.
My parents didn't have the opportunities that my wife and I have now, from a quality of life standpoint.
Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it's not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument.
As I predicted, young people who overwhelmingly didn't want Brexit have turned out in their droves and exacted revenge on a generation of Leavers who they believe stole their future while enjoying generous pensions as they denied them the first rung on the property ladder.
This is the greatest society in all of human history, the greatest country ever. Many of the decisions being made in Washington today by both parties are threatening that greatness. And if we stay on this road we're on right now, our children are going to be the first Americans ever to inherit a diminished country.
Modernity has reneged on its promise to young people to provide social mobility, stability and collective security. Long-term planning and the institutional structures that support them are now relegated to the imperatives of privatization, deregulation, flexibility and short-term profits.
