Divider-in-Chief (10 page)

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) back up these findings. According to the BLS, on June 1, 2012, 12.1 percent of young people had unsuccessfully looked for a job during the last several weeks.
⁶
The underlying data also showed that 1.7 million people aged eighteen to twenty-nine had given up looking for jobs. And at 15.4 percent, the jobless rate for 18- to 24-year-olds was nearly twice the overall jobless rate.

That news came after a May 9, 2012, Gallup report that showed 13.6 percent of 18- to-29 year-olds were unemployed, and 32 percent were underemployed, in April.
⁷
That underemployment rate was up from 30.1 percent in April and is more than twice the rate for people aged thirty to sixty-four.

The Obama economy is hurting young people in other ways as well. In April 2012, Obama became the first president since Jimmy Carter to see gas prices double under his watch.
⁸
(In comparison, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan gas prices dropped 66 percent.) Because young people
are more likely than older workers to be un- or under-employed, and to earn less when they do have a job, high gas prices and higher commuter transportation costs hit them harder.

Many young people are postponing marriage and children, not just because of general social trends in that direction but because they believe they can't afford to support a family. And stories are legion about young people with mountains of debt they are unable to pay off. In 2010, for the first time ever, student loan debt exceeded credit card debt. As of late 2011, the average student loan debt was $25,250.
⁹
In 2012 total student loan debt eclipsed the trillion dollar figure.
¹⁰
And nearly six million Americans have a past-due student loan account.
¹¹

According to the Associated Press, recent graduates are now more likely to work as “waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined.”
¹²
All of these statistics explain why more than one-third of young people aged twenty-five to twenty-nine have moved back in with their parents in recent years.
¹³

As he does with each of his constituencies, President Obama tries to create solidarity with young people. He tells them he feels their pain. Speaking to students at the University of North Carolina in April 2012, Obama told the crowd he and his wife had “been in your shoes,” and that they didn't pay off all their loans until a few years earlier.

“I didn't just read about this,” he said. “I didn't just get some talking points about this. I didn't just get a policy briefing on this. We didn't come from wealthy families. When we graduated from college and law school, we had a mountain of debt. When we married, we got poor together.”
¹⁴

President Obama's policies to address America's mounting student debt amount to a government takeover of the student loan industry.

When Obamacare was passed in 2010, it included the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), a program that nationalized college
student loans. It was a gimmick to increase revenues and make it look like Obamacare reduced the deficit. SAFRA eliminated guaranteed college loans—loans originated through private lenders but completely backed by taxpayer money—and made almost all lending direct from the U.S. Treasury.

As they have on so many other issues, Obama and his Democratic allies removed the intermediary—in this case private lenders—standing between the individual and the federal government. The result is that, today, 85 percent of all student loan debt is owed to the government.

Obama signed a law in March 2010 that expanded Pell grants. It also capped loan repayments at 10 percent of income above the basic living allowance, and forgave loan payments after twenty years of on-time payments, or ten years if the borrower is employed in public service—that is, as a teacher, police officer, or in some other taxpayer-supported job, or in the non-profit sector.

But Obama's plan, imposed by executive order, not passed by Congress, covered only public loans, not private loans, and thus it effectively punishes students who receive loans from outside the federal government.

What's more, as of February 2012, the Obama administration stopped forgiving student loans for public service work if that service is related to religion. The language of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program is as follows: “Generally, the type or nature of employment with the organization does not matter for PSLF purposes. However, when determining full-time public service employment at a not-for-profit organization you may not include time spent participating in religious instruction, worship services, or any form of proselytizing.” So a young person working to help the needy through the Salvation Army, Samaritan's Purse, or Catholic Relief Services would not have his student loans forgiven, but a young person working as a federal bureaucrat at HHS would.

I empathize with those paying off mountains of school debt. But while “forgiving” student loans may sound compassionate, it has to be paid by someone. In this case, it will be paid for by future generations, including
those who pay taxes but didn't have the chance or make the choice to go to college.

Obama's out-of-control borrowing and spending places a huge burden on future generations. The Congressional Budget Office projects that cumulative national debt will increase in the next decade by $9.8 trillion, a sum that will mean lower standards of living for Americans in the future. Some policymakers have labeled the spending “generational theft.”
¹⁵

According to statistics from the Obama administration, the actual or projected deficit tallies for the four years in which Obama has submitted budgets are as follows:

The
Weekly Standard
's Jeffrey Anderson added up all of Obama's spending, (including hundreds of billions of spending in the stimulus package and other spending items) and concluded that deficit spending for Obama's first term will be $5.17 trillion.
¹⁶

“To help put that colossal sum of money into perspective,” Anderson writes, “if you take our deficit spending under Obama and divide it evenly among the roughly 300 million American citizens, that works out to just over $17,000 per person—or about $70,000 for a family of four.” To put it another way, Obama is on target to increase the national debt in just one term as much as all previous U.S. presidents did combined.
¹⁷

It is not an exaggeration to say that thanks in part to Obama's out-of-control spending, today's young people are the first generation in American history to face a future in which they are less prosperous than their parents.

Obamacare disproportionately hurts young people, because they're the ones who will have to pay for it.

In his Supreme Court opinion upholding Obamacare, which evoked outrage from constitutional conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts got one point right. He wrote, “If the individual mandate is targeted at a class, it is a class whose commercial inactivity rather than activity is its defining feature.”
¹⁸
Young people are indeed a “targeted class” under Obamacare.

First, young Americans will be coerced into buying health care—they are needed to make the government scheme feasible, so they will be forced into buying what they may not want or need. If they don't, they will be forced to pay a penalty tax. (Many still won't buy insurance because the tax is less than the insurance, which will only increase the overall cost of Obamacare.)

Second, because of government price controls, Obamacare mandates artificially low premiums for older Americans and artificially high premiums for low-risk young people. Contrary to Obama's promise that premiums would go down, the Heritage Foundation found that Obamacare will result in premium hikes of 45 percent for 18- to 24-year-olds, and 35 percent for 25- to 29-year-olds.
¹⁹

And young people—and the colleges, parents, and employers who might be paying for their premiums—are forbidden under Obamacare from buying affordable and practical “limited-benefit” health insurance, which caps health care expenses for this low-risk pool. Consequently, colleges across the country have dropped their student plans, because Obamacare increases the costs of those plans by upwards of 1,000 percent.
²⁰

Many young people cannot afford to take on the extra financial burden of health insurance. They are healthy and their health care expenses are relatively low. But Obamacare's individual mandate requires that all adults buy “qualifying health insurance” or face an excise tax penalty of at least 2.5 percent of adjusted gross income. That's a painful expense for a generation
that can't find work commensurate with their education and that is already putting off life decisions because of concerns about expenses.

Obamacare also hurts young people's employment prospects. According to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey, 74 percent of small businesses said that Obamacare makes it more difficult for them to hire new employees, and 30 percent are not planning to hire at all due to the law.
²¹

For some businesses, the costs of hiring new employees are now prohibitive. Moreover, the uncertainty regarding the full implications of the law once implemented in 2014, combined with Obama's determination to let the Bush tax cuts expire, add deterrents to hiring.

Whether it's the job market, student loan debt, taxes, Obamacare, or the national debt, Obama's policies have made young people poorer and their prospects for prosperity bleaker.

Yet Obama is pulling out all the stops to try and repeat his 2008 performance among young people. A reporter for the
Daily Caller
counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and Cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities between spring 2011 and spring 2012.
²²
Young America's Foundation found that the president himself has been on high school or college campuses once every 12 days since his inauguration.
²³

But the slogans young people bought into—“Hope and Change” in particular—are turning out to be a big bust. The administration that pledged to be the most transparent in history is full of secrecy and executive privilege. The petty partisanship that young people despise is at an all-time high. And the economic outlook for them in the near- and long-term is downright bleak.

An April NBC/
Wall Street Journal
poll showed only 45 percent of young people were taking a big interest in the election, compared to
63 percent in 2008.
²⁴
Gallup polling numbers show that more than 80 percent of older Americans say they will definitely vote, while only 56 percent of Americans under thirty say the same.
²⁵

An April survey by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that Obama held a 17-point lead over Romney among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine. But it showed that only 41 percent of white Millennials approved of Obama's job performance—significantly lower than the 54 percent who voted for him in 2008.
²⁶

The Harvard survey also found that 58 percent of Millennials said the economy was a top issue and that only 41 percent approved Obama's handling of it.
²⁷

A June 2012 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the opportunity of the next generation to reach the American dream of having a better life than their parents.
²⁸
Meanwhile, according to numerous polls on the RealClearPolitics website, throughout Obama's term, twice as many Americans have thought America is on the “wrong track” as believe it is on the “right track.”

Barack Obama has played young people. He reached out to them with soaring speeches championing unity, and they responded to his call to transcend differences and engage in a new kind of politics. In fact, they responded with more enthusiasm, more genuine hope than any other demographic. And the president repaid their trust with betrayal—becoming not the great uniter, but the most divisive president in history. He has robbed them of current and future prosperity, perverted their understanding of the value of hard work, ambition, and the American dream, and poisoned their optimism—the very optimism he used to soar to victory in 2008.

Americans are optimistic by nature. Their current pessimism about the future can't all be blamed on Barack Obama. But he bears a large portion of the responsibility. Obama is doing young people a great injustice by pursuing an agenda that pits them against their future.

B
arack Obama won the 2008 Democratic nomination for president by defeating the first serious female presidential candidate in U.S. history.

2008 was supposed to be Hillary Clinton's year. She was poised to finally shatter the presidential glass ceiling and become America's first female president. Millions of American women yearned for that outcome, and most Republicans had resigned themselves to the prospect of facing the formidable senator and former first lady. Pundits and pollsters were regularly using the “I” word to describe Clinton's nomination prospects—inevitable.

Obama won instead, of course, and he did so in no small measure due to the support of women. While Hillary edged Obama among female voters overall, Obama won them in many key primary states. In Virginia, for instance, Obama won women by twenty-one percentage points (60 percent to 39 percent), on his way to a 25-point win overall in that state.
¹