It might seem easy to say, “you get what you vote for,” to the millions of young voters who supported President Obama and now can’t find work.
But, with a record number of young Americans becoming homeless, blaming the victim of President Obama’s well-crafted rhetoric doesn’t seem right.
In one of his last campaign speeches, President Obama told a crowd of people at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, “We tried our ideas; they worked. The economy grew. We created jobs.”
This sham President Obama cooked-up is nothing short of immoral for the millions of young Americans that have been living in Obama’s economic hell the last four years.
The Democratic Party renders themselves as the party of compassion, yet under any measurement, young Americans have never been more economically miserable under any other President in recorded history.
And, the misery continues to worsen. A recent article in The New York Times reported that young people are “the new face of a national homeless population, one that poverty experts and case workers say is growing.” And according to Andrea Bailey, the executive director of the Community Food and Outreach Center, it is becoming increasingly more common for young people to seek help from homeless shelters.
The cities of Los Angeles and Boston attempted to count the exact number of young Americans that have been forced to move onto the streets. In 2011, it was estimated that 3,600 young Americans were living on the streets of Los Angeles. The number rises significantly if you count those temporarily sleeping on their friends’ couch.
The amount of young Americans in Boston seeking shelter represented 12 percent of the total homeless population in 2011, up 3 percentage points from the previous year. But they fear that this isn’t anywhere close to the actual number of young Americans occupying their streets. “It’s a significant enough jump to know that it’s also just the tip of the iceberg,” said Jim Greene, director of emergency shelters for the Boston Public Health Commission.
This news is incredibly disheartening, but should we be surprised? No. While President Obama boasted from his ivory towers on the campaign trail that over 4.5 million jobs have been created in the last four years, young Americans have had a drastically different experience.
In the last four years under President Obama, 397,000 youth jobs were destroyed and youth unemployment averaged 17.5 percent--the highest level in recorded history. 53 percent of recent graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and young Americans currently represent 40 percent of the total unemployed population.
While recent numbers suggest youth unemployment is going down, more young people continue to drop out of the work force. In the month of November alone, 153,000 young Americans ages 20-24 completely gave up looking for work and the Labor Force Participation rate dropped from 54.4 percent to 54.1 percent.
I guess they didn’t want anything to do with those 4.5 million private sector jobs that President Obama claimed he created.
Youth unemployment is a serious problem. Homelessness is even more unfathomable. But the real concern lies in the mentality that this type of environment is creating among Millennials.
Anyone forced to live a life on the streets lives a life of survival. Instead of looking for a job, you’re looking for the next meal. Instead of helping businesses grow and create jobs for these young people, President Obama has been satisfied growing the welfare state and providing the next meal. The government food stamp program has grown 50 percent during his term.
The Obama economy is taking the wind out of the sails of these young Americans fresh out of college who truly wanted to start their careers. This President and this economy are breeding a new generation of entitlement and dependency by letting young people believe that it is acceptable to solely rely on the government.
But this won’t get them very far. Young people were sold a bill of goods this election, and they bought it--even after the last four years of economic hell. It’s only downhill from here.
Conservatives have failed to step in and articulate the message that more freedom and less government spending create more jobs and more independence for young people. Until they do so--or until our economy totally fails--young Americans will continue to fall into the Obama entitlement trap.
With no jobs and nowhere to turn but to President Obama, an overwhelming majority of the population will be in favor of a dependency-centered, debt-ridden government. We see it happening in Europe, and look where it’s gotten them. We’d be naive to think it wouldn’t happen here. Conservative leaders have the moral obligation to propose a brighter future for young Americans and our country to ensure it doesn’t.