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HOME EQUITY LOANS BECOMING UNCOLLECTIBLE
UNEMPLOYED YOUNG AMERICANS
Posted by: Darrell Castle
January 27, 2010
Topic: Bankruptcy
The U.S. economic recession has taken a heavy toll on young Americans according to Reuters.com. There are record numbers of black men aged 20 to 24 neither working or in school. Teenagers have found it very difficult to find jobs. About 68 percent of black teenagers are currently unemployed. Teenagers often use part time jobs as a way to pay for school and as a spring board to future full time employment and those jobs are rapidly disappearing from the job market. U.S. Census Bureau data show that only 26 percent of teenagers aged 16 to 19 were employed in 2009 an all time low. Those figures do not include those young people in prison.
The prospects for young people today are grim whether they are black, white, Hispanic or something else and whether they are poor, low income workers or Ivy League educated. This has been widely reported in newspapers such as the New York Times which carried a feature article in the Sunday, January 24, 2010 edition about young lawyers in New York and other cities having to lower their expectations. Young people have always been told to "live your dreams" and to "go for it" or "be all you can be" but today military service is available, but not much else.
America needs to deleverage and clean out its debt both public and private in order to allow the economy to rebuild and get people back to work. Further, in today's times of struggle, the minimum wage laws, which are intended to raise people to a living wage instead do the opposite. The employment rate is hurt by employers' inability to hire at market rates thus destroying lower paying and part time jobs. We should take a hard look at what all this is doing to us as a society and soon or the destruction will get much worse.
Don't wait for the government, whether federal or state level, to do the right thing. Get out of debt as quickly as possible.
