There’s so much nonsense in this piece I don’t know where to start:
Look, 20-somethings, it’s only partly your fault that the economy is still a mess — most of you voted for you know who — but it isn’t your fault that you lack the skills to deal with it.
Your generation has been coddled like no other generation before it — never has any generation been given so much for doing so little — and that is your parents’ fault.
It’s payback time.
Parade suggests your parents charge you at least a token rent. Mom and Dad will likely assume that you’ll offer a stipend of some kind. Don’t.
Your father will complain to your mother — eventually they’ll get into loud arguments over the matter — but if you hold steady, you’ll likely keep living at home for free.
To that end, it will help to gripe loudly about your college loan bills. Mom and Dad will feel guilty that they were unable to pay for all your college costs — further ensuring that Mom won’t let Dad ask you for rent.
***The Wall Street boys made risky decisions and the taxpayers bailed them out.
States that overspent during the good times want the federal government to bail them out during the bad times.
Our federal government is spending billions more than it is taking in and expects future taxpayers to bail it out.
Since few adults appear to be interested in carrying their own load, who can criticize 20-somethings who are moving home to mooch off Mom and Dad?
A great recession like ours comes along once in a lifetime. Don’t let it pass without free drinks from Dad’s liquor cabinet.
Because as everyone knows, what all 20-somethings want in life is to move back in with their parents.
Also love how he is blaming the 20-somethings for ruining the economy- because they voted for Barack. It’s almost like he wants to pretend the economy was not destroyed before we even held the 2008 election.
But cheer up, 20-somethings. As Tom Purcell proves, you can not know anything and still have a lucrative gig churning out nonsense columns.
arguingwithsignposts
wait, I thought we gen-xers were coddled! I want my money back!
JCT
Wow, WTF?
Maybe he used Bristol and Levi as his sole “sources”, naw more like he just pulled all of this out of his ass.
Hmmmm, sounds liked this guy needs a nice bag of poisoned, salted rat dicks to munch on.
GambitRF
Look, 20-somethings, it’s only partly your fault that the economy is still a mess
Wow, I thought it was entirely my fault! That’s a weight off my shoulders!!
ChrisS
If it’s not the kids being blamed for the economy, it’s the laborers (If they’d only work harder for less money, I wouldn’t have to ship my factory overseas) or the government (Aye dios mio, the taxes, I canna take it).
Everyone is to blame except the people with all money making all the decisions.
Meh, I’ve only got another 35 or so years on this rock.
Scott
Screw poisoning the fucker. Just give him what he deserves — a pink slip — and let him see how far his arrogance carries him in the New Economy.
Comrade Javamanphil
Hey, Michael Steele, I’d like to introduce you to your new Director for Youth Outreach.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Coming up next: The deficit is my fault as well, because you know, kids these days.
Zifnab
Listen, John. 20-year-olds today were 18 in 2008. And we all know that as goes the Fresh-out-of-High-School brand new voters, so goes the nation. These voters make up solid single digits of the electorate. It’s not like Obama won in a landslide nationwide across multiple ages, both genders, and a plethora of ethnicities.
I feel like we’re living in fucking Harry Potter land. You can’t say the President’s name? Douchebag. Fucking grow a pair.
xochi
This guy is a ‘humor columnist’? And we wonder why newspapers are dying.
Rosalita
@arguingwithsignposts:
No, we’re cynical and don’t respect authority.
khead
Dad offered one time back when I was in my 20’s – even had a job hook up – but it would have meant moving back to southern WV. I passed. Dad’s liquor cabinet sucked.
Cricket
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that a conservative would fail to recognize the obstacles faced by others. I mean, sure, we’re in the middle of the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression, but these damn kids are mollycoddled. They should be out there working nonexistent jobs to pay their parents rent.
And of course, Barack Obama caused the economy to collapse in 2007 through the power of voodoo. He was sticking pins into Henry Paulson dolls and praying over goat entrails to make banks overvalue assets. What else can you expect from a Kenyan Muslin Socialist?
suzanne
I (and my 18-month old daughter) moved back in with my mother when I was 25 so I could go back to graduate school. Even with the roof over my head and help with childcare and working as a teaching assistant, I am now a hundred thousand dollars in debt. From a state school. I love my mom and we get along better than most, but that SUCKED.
I am so fucking sick and tired of being told that I’m lazy and have no work ethic. I spent the last three Thanksgivings at school working. It wasn’t me who speculated on real estate instead of, like, you know, HAVING A REAL JOB.
Svensker
Who is this guy? Does he actually get published anywhere? I’m an old hippie who can yell Get Off My Lawn with the best of them and tut tut over the New Generation real good, but this person is an idiot.
'twenty something'
Fuck this guy. I’m one of those ‘twenty somethings’ who proudly voted for Obama, and I did so because Republicans have been mortgaging my future to pay for their fucking wars and tax cuts. I’m also, to use the parlance of this idiot’s ideological cohorts, someone who works long hours and ‘eats what he kills.’ I know for a fact that I’ve worked harder days than that bloated piece of shit.
And guess what? I’m moving back in with my dad. Or, rather, my dad is moving in with me, because his business was wrecked after Reaganomics reached its logical conclusion. He’s got no retirement, little savings, and a medical condition that’s probably going to get worse, and because this fat fuck voted for a Bush four times, Dole once, and Reagan twice his life’s work has been demolished, and I’m very proud to have the financial wherewithall to live with him during the twilight of his life.
Did I mention that the guy who wrote that article can go fuck himself? Because he should.
Bill E Pilgrim
Speaking of nonsense, via Greg Sargent, the Anti-Defamation League comes out against allowing mosques to be built in lower Manhattan citing this:
This has got to go down in the pantheon of sayings alongside “Technically correct but collectively nonsense”.
I can just see: “You’re under arrest and you have the right to remain silent– however in this case even though you have the right, it’s not right, so I’m going to force you to speak and incriminate yourself…”
Maybe they don’t realize that the two uses of the word “right” have the same root?
Camchuck
Yes, unemployed 20-somethings living at home: the luckiest of the Lucky Duckies.
Cassidy
So we’re no longer blaming black people?
Svensker
@Bill E Pilgrim:
That’s great — the Anti-Defamation League designates Muslims as the new kikes. Brilliant. What a world.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cassidy: Well, black 20-somethings in particular.
Now you kids get off of my lawn because I need to go get an onion for my belt.
sukabi
More than likely HIS 20 something just moved back home and his wife won’t let him charge the moocher rent.
someone that writes stupid shit like that IS the perfect person to give advice about mooching… it’s what he does for a living, because there is no way he’s paid for writing intelligent, well thought out pieces.
The Grand Panjandrum
From the bio sketch under his picture at the linked piece:
Nuff said.
Jacquie
I just really love how he assumes that “[t]he Wall Street boys [who] made risky decisions” and “20-somethings” are mutually exclusive groups.
Gozer
@Cassidy:
I would assume young black bucks are a subset of twentysomethings.
…
And as a twentysomething, fuck that guy.
FlipYrWhig
@sukabi:
I had the same thought. The whole litany of complaints sounded weirdly personal.
Fanshawe
If smug baby-boomer self-aggrandizement could be refined as an energy souce, we would end our reliance on fossil fuels tomorrow.
grandpajohn
irony abounds , This asshat who evidently makes a living by writing jr high level screeds that are supposedly what? opinion pieces and who gets paid for the inane drivel and has the audacity to write about others making a living by being moochers when he is a supreme example of a moocher by simply taking a paycheck for this kind of hackery. I wonder if he has the decency to blush when he gets his checks for writing this garbage.
Urza
Somewhat off topic:
son of a bitch the conservatives always beat me to fleecing their moronic flock and their ideas are always sillier than mine http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20012197-503544.html?tag=stack
Michael Reagan wants people to buy @reagan.com email addresses from him so he can use the money to promote Reagan’s values, likely starting with his own bank account. He thinks Google and AOL are to liberal and people shouldn’t give them money. Advertising money maybe, but google never charged for email, and AOL went free a couple years ago. Google might be semi liberal but AOL (which I worked for) was never even remotely liberal in their politics and policies.
RSR
Was there any mention of ‘trustafarians’ or ‘fauxhemians’ in that article?
Bnut
My dad’s been sober for almost 10 years. The only free drinks I get at home are club soda with lime. They need to spruce the place up a but if they expect me to come in and mooch off them.
Poopyman
@Svensker:
I just want my country back. You know, the one that had at least the appearance of having some fucking brains.
(/tears)
@Rosalita:
By that measure, this 56 year-old is a Gen-Xer. Although it would be nice to know how to get the clock on my VCR to stop blinking 12:00.
Fanshawe
@Poopyman:
By that measure, this 56 year-old is a Gen-Xer. Although it would be nice to know how to get the clock on my VCR to stop blinking 12:00.
V…C…R…?
/useless 20-something moocher
dj spellchecka
“States that overspent during the good times want the federal government to bail them out during the bad times.”
correct me if i’m wrong, but don’t all state govenments have to operate under balanced budgets? i know mine does….
wonder if this guy understands that bush and the gop put two wars on the chinese credit card and the completely unfunded medicare part d into future deficits..doesn’t THAT count as pawning off debt on the kids?
ps: according to an nbc news book on the 08 election, if no one under thirty had voted, obama would have lost only two states he won ..indiana and north carolina..
Xecky Gilchrist
@Zifnab: You can’t say the President’s name? Douchebag. Fucking grow a pair.
Actually, it’s foresight – “You know who” is really Clinton, and that allowed this Boomer-snotting-at-GenXers column from 1994 to be reprinted verbatim.
(Not looking for a Boomer/GenXer war because I know not all Boomers are assholes, but there were a lot of articles of this type printed in the 1990s. I got really fucking sick of being called a slacker by pampered columnists.)
Xenocrates
Hey, between the seekret Muslin in the White House, those whacky 20-year olds voting for him (even though they live at home with Mom and Dad!) and the Huge Librul Conspirasee to Take Over Your Grandmother, I just don’t understand why those Patriotic, Hard-Working Men and Women of Wall Street (aka Degenerate Gamblers) were fooled by this! What a giant, steaming load of crap…but what else can one expect from the GOP and their spineless defenders? Once again, the economic crisis was a direct result of the deregulation of the financial industry, Bush’s exploits at making the Federal Government nearly toothless and the endless rah-rah speeches from Greenspan and the WSJ editorial page. Not ACORN. Not Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. Just good, old-fashioned crony capitalism. Now, gtfo, you cranio-rectally inverted shithead. Yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Purcell.
Bob L
@Xecky Gilchrist: I thought “You know who” was Jimmy Carter. After all he was the one who forced the banks to give mortgages to irresponsible people who just happen to have dark skin tones.
Omnes Omnibus
@Xecky Gilchrist:
I hate these Boomer/Gen X fights because I can never pick sides. Born in 1964, I supposedly am a member of the Boomers, but Kennedy was dead before I was born and Woodstock meant nothing to me. Gen X fits better culturally, but … Dammit, someone pigeonhole me.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Omnes Omnibus: I think you’re the sort they invented “Generation Jones” for.
That, and so that Boomers wouldn’t have to let Obama be considered Gen X.
Jody
Judging from his wrap=up, he wrote the article ironically. Still, it was terribly executed.
Linda Featheringill
The dumdum who wrote the column probably doesn’t realize, but all of us should because we are smart, that busts and booms are an integral part of capitalism. And they happen no matter who you blame. You can tweak capitalism but you cannot totally reform it.
So the whole blame-the-20-somethings for the current mess is total and complete nonsense.
ET
I don’t know that I disagree with this:
Your generation has been coddled like no other generation before it — never has any generation been given so much for doing so little — and that is your parents’ fault.
but actually it is writers generation that is mostly at fault and trying to blame the young ones who disagree with you politically is pretty lame and actually pretty juvenile.
cmorenc
Count on the GOP defiantly insisting that the current economic situation was caused by and began with the Obama Administration, regardless of numerous objective facts to the contrary (such as when the recession/default crisis/TARP bailouts begun, well BEFORE Obama’s election). They count on the power of repeated repetition of a meme to drum a notion in people’s minds, the same way many advertisements are designed to work even when people aren’t paying close attention during the commercial breaks. So long as the repeated message has a simple, catchy, plausibly attractive hook, and the person isn’t already primed to react with harsh skepticism, the advertising message tends to stealthily sink in without setting off the person’s bullshit filters. Most 27-percenters long ago turned off their bullshit filters toward anything the right-wing propaganda machine puts out, and turn them to auto-reject of anything contrary thereto sources not loyally parroting right wing talking points says. Too many uncommitted voters simply don’t pay close enough attention much of the time to be able to recall and accurately sort through even obvious, elementary objective history about national events, though they can remember astonishing amounts of detail about college football games or whole seasons from three years ago.
slag
Get real, John. We’re not all pudgy white boys with bad haircuts who have bravado enough to gleefully churn out nonsense columns despite our obvious lack of any knowledge or ability whatsoever. That’s talent! Talent that our God has deemed special enough to reserve for only a precious few.
QuaintIrene
And hey, don’t forget us aging entitled baby boomers who are selfishly expecting to live high off the hog on Social Security.
Donald G
As a forty-something house-spouse who put his own life on hold and took care of the kids before finishing his degree while the wife got her doctorate and thus has no degree and no marketable job skills, I take great offense on behalf of the twenty-somethings scapegoated in this jerk’s screed.
There’s a difference between being lazy and lacking a work ethic and deciding not to work part-time at minimum wage in retail as part of a (now bankrupt and out of business) corporation whose embrace of the concept of metrics means that your value as an employee is based not on your work ethic, knowledge, and willingness to provide helpful customer service, but rather on how you maximize dollar units per transaction and con people through fast talking, hardsell tactics and confusing math into locking up their hard earned money on useless items like, for example, prepaid discount movie rental cards… in the middle of a recession that has eaten away your customer base’s discretionary spending and put you out of business.
To hell with corporate America, where the bosses earn way more than they deserve for the work they put into their companies and the actual worker gets constantly screwed without benefit of lube or foreplay.
PTirebiter
I kind of liked the comment on Purcell’s blog from Republican Strategist
“Purcell, you’re a genius! We’ve had so much trouble with the 20’s demographic, but no longer,,, We, the GOP, need to try something that’s worked so well in the past – rambling, fact-free idiocy. We’ll confuse the 20-somethings into supporting us!”
jrg
Maybe death panels are a good idea, after all.
Thoroughly Pizzled
Cagle.com is the website I visit when I’m feeling especially masochistic. Its awfulness ranks up there with Chick Tracts and Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
Common Sense
@grandpajohn:
This was always what cracked me up about Ayn Rand. If all the producers went Galt and took their money with them, are they really going to need a half baked philosopher to come along for the ride? What does she contribute to society, exactly, that a single mom working and living on WIC doesn’t?
Omnes Omnibus
@Common Sense:
Ineffable genius. You couldn’t possibly understand.
ajr22
As a 20″something” who along with all his friends voted for Obama, all I can say is I hope none of my friends grow up to be as big a douche as this guy.
Cerberus
Let me draft a cogent and thoughtful response to the original author:
Ahem.
Fuck you. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. FUCK YOU!
My generation has been fucked before we ever began. Benefits that used to exist don’t. The economy has been fucked for over a decade. Minimum wage doesn’t cover shit and even people making double minimum wage can’t pay down both car payments and rent, let’s not even get into that whole pesky eating thing or that medical thing (we pretty much have to pray we don’t get sick or injured).
We’re “moving back home” because you and your evil degenerate psychopath fucktards made it nearly physically impossible for our generation to survive on our own, while you continue to fuck us over for every last penny.
And then we get to hear your horseshit about how when you were young, i.e. before you gutted the social safety net, made the minimum wage a joke compared to the living wage, destroyed all the entry level jobs, and outsourced the rest overseas, you just pulled yourselves up by the bootstraps so why can’t we?
Fuck you.
I’ve got so many friends literally surviving on the kindness of strangers, ones with employment limping along paycheck to paycheck. I’m one of them and I’ve got a fucking Master’s degree.
So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
So fucking angry.
dj spellchecka
Your generation has been coddled like no other generation before it — never has any generation been given so much for doing so little — and that is your parents’ fault.
i was a teenager in the 60’s …talk about coddled…i suspect being a teenager during the bushco years sucked by comparison…
gypsy howell
Get a clue 20-somethings, GenXers and Baby Boomers:
The conservatives aren’t confident that the race war will be enough to distract and divide us, so they’re ginning up the intergenerational war. It’s the selfish Gen-Xers! It’s the Slothful Millenials! It’s the sucking chest wound of the retiring Baby Boomers!
They just want us all sniping at and blaming each other so we won’t notice who’s really stealing every last nickel from us.
We should take a lesson from Shirley Sherrod on this. It’s got nothing to do with what generation you’re in, any more than it ‘s got anything to do with what color you are.
It’s the haves versus the have nots. And the haves are clearly winning.
Don’t fall for this bullshit.
redoubt
@Omnes Omnibus: And the chance to be Chief of Galt’s Gulch Volunteer Fire Department.
Ryan S
Where’s his lawn so I can go piss in it.
Omnes Omnibus
@redoubt: Ha, I caught you in a logical contradiction. Galt’s Gulch could not possibly have a volunteer fire department. If people want their fires extinguished, they should be willing to pay for the privilege.
Poopyman
Jeebus, Gyps, no fear of that happening. The other side has been at this a looong time – long before I was called a long-haired (true) hippy (false) in 1970. After you’ve seen it deployed about once a decade it just rolls off your back. Maybe I’m too glib in assuming it’s rolled off the backs of everyone else here.
Besides, you and I aren’t his target audience. This is just another pellet of manure to feed the nascent hate of little rightwing upstarts.
XOXOXO,
…P, fondly remembering when he still had hair.
Linda Featheringill
@Cerberus: I think you write very well. Perhaps John & Co. would be amenable to having you write a post, preferably about something you would like to rant about.
I am serious. John, are you listening? This rant was actually quite readable.
trueblood
@Jody:
No, sorry, stop. Unless irony has a new definition that I’m unaware of, one that includes the phrase “terribly executed,” in addition to “not funny” and “poorly written.”
Janet Strange
@gypsy howell:
Exactly. Focus, folks, focus.
gypsy howell
@Poopyman:
I think the right wing knows that playing the racist card will only work in a big way for them for a few more decades. I wish we baby boomers were as liberal as we were always made out to be, but sadly, the percentage of us who were truly DFH’s was always pretty small. Most of the baby boomers grew up to be only slightly less reactionary than their parents, and you can argue that a lot of them are just as bad or worse, needing to assign blame for our declining fortunes on someone other than the real culprits.
It must scare the crap out of the right wing that the today’s younger generation truly is so much more multicultural in their outlook.
So, ginning up the generational wars seems like a good approach. Blame the younger generation for not getting up off their asses. Blame the baby boomers for sucking the lifeblood out of society when it comes their time to retire. I’m sure we can blame the genXers for something too.
It would do all of us good to take a deep breath before we start getting defensive about our particular generation, and hurling insults about at each other.
WE are not each other’s enemy.
It’s class warfare, pure and simple. We better get good at it, or we’re going to live and die as constantly struggling wage slaves if we’re lucky, and completely destitute if we’re not.
MikeTheZ
I’d post what I think about this (and anyone else who tries to blame people who had no vote for the morons who passed Bush’s ruinous policies, as well as the deregulation that’s been going on for that last few decades, for the mess we’re in now), but it would just come out to nothing more then a bunch of profanity. And to be completely honest, I don’t know enough profanity to accurately describe what I think about this.
Mike G
Repuke ideology in a nutshell.
redoubt
@Omnes Omnibus: (insert sarcasmfail tag here)
Kyle
What impeccable credentials.
Jody
trueblood:
Perhaps I’m being too generous. I have difficulty telling serious wingnuts from parody anymore.
r€nato
@Cassidy:
blaming the darkies is Mondays and Wednesdays.
Tuesdays is blaming the illegals.
Thursdays is blaming the youth.
Fridays is blaming intellectuals and elitists.
Saturdays is take-your-pick.
Sundays is blaming atheists and abortionists.
Enlightened Layperson
Um, aren’t conservatives supposed to favor family values and want people to turn to family in time of trouble instead of the Evil Government (a/k/a unemployment insurance)?
Enlightened Layperson
And of course, we would be so much better off if we had let the finance system crash, added to unemployment by mass layoffs of government workers, and had 20 somethings standing out on bread lines instead of living with their parents. That’s the real problem with our economy — people just aren’t hurting enough. [/snark]
Bill Murray
He’s a conservative humor columnist, that should give you an idea where his trainwreck is coming from.
and Alan Greenspan never thought Rand was ineffable, he thought she was totally f-able — hat tip to “Bones” for that joke
sherparick
The “haves” like to feel virtuous, that they have hit a home run, even though they were born on third, and laugh at the lazy slugs dodging bean balls back at home. Although not thrilled at the Bob Rubin, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers economics plan endorsed and adopted by Obama, the actual facts show that the bulk of the disaster occurred under Bush, and what growth there was in 2002-2007 was the result of the housing bubble that these same turds said proved how successful Republican policies had been. And they were very successful for the upper 1%.
For the actual data on economic course of the last 3 years, see: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com today on 2d Q 2010 GDP.
trueblood
@Jody: I appreciate that you’re trying not to immediately judge someone, but if all I have to go on is that piece and his little blurb bio, I’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt here. As some others have suggested, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a 20-something who just moved back in. I bet his liquor cabinet is pretty awful, though. Leave dad’s goldschlager alone!
Gus
I work for a software company, which means that in my mid-40s I qualify as a grizzled veteran. The 20-somethings I work with are without exception, smart, capable, and mature in a way I wasn’t when I was their age. Every generation talks this way about the ones that come after it, and they never know what the fuck they’re talking about.
D-Chance.
@Poopyman:
Your VCR problem. I can fix that.
Duct tape. One piece over the 12:00 and it goes away forever.
Problem solved.
The Raven
Isn’t this, in small, the same thing we’ve been hearing from everywhere else, though? Austerity, even though that makes no sense at all.
Not Likely
PUMA HQ Noquarter ran almost this exact some “article” back in 2009:
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2009/11/30/the-reviled-baby-boomers-who-know-nothing-find-that-their-i-know-everything-kids-are-moving-back-home-at-an-alarming-rate/
Nice to see nonsense bubbling up.
elgreeb
I’ m very late to post, possibly nobody will read this. I am a parent of people who are in their twenties. I also know and sometimes associate with other people who are in their twenties. Nineteen of twenty of these little shitheads work their ass’s off. They are worthy of respect, not derision. End of post.