The Millennial Democracy

From the end of the second World War in 1945 until roughly the late 1970s, the average American worker and family, alongside the national economy as a whole, enjoyed an unprecedented stretch of growth and improvement. Manufacturing remained strong, union membership was at or near historic highs, service sector jobs were booming, home ownership saw a consistent rise, university education became accessible to millions, real wages rose alongside life expectancy and the average American's quality of live consistently improved decade over decade. Due to a variety of factors, however, this growth began to slow and even sputtered during the Oil Shock and stagflation years of the late 70s. This led to large-scale deregulation beginning under President Carter, carrying on into and well past the Reagan administration. Instead of simply updating regulations and retooling the economic levers available to state and federal governments, America ushered in the Neoliberal era of trickle-down econo...

News of President Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Program, in the amount of $10,000-$20,000 per borrower, is a welcome fulfillment of one of the President's most well known and oft-cited campaign promises. With over $1.7 trillion dollars collectively owed in student loan debt across the nation, our higher education system has produced an unstable debt bubble slowly eating away at the economic progress and upward mobility of the American people. From holding off on having children to being unable to afford mortgages on their first home, student loan debt is saddling entire generations with a burden that's only getting worse. While the positive personal and economic effects of this debt forgiveness program will likely be felt for years to come, the program's very existence reveals a much deeper and wider problem with how higher education is structured in the modern United States. Back in the early 1960's, one could attend a community college full-time for an average ...