Here is the issue. It doesn't lie with a generation of young people, but with six decades of corporate greed. If you plot average wages and average cost of living, from 1900 to about 1975, they tracked pretty well. Not perfect year to year, but over the long haul, the part of your paycheck that kept you in food and shelter remained fairly steady.
That all changed in the mid 70s. Wages stopped keeping up with cost of living. It has consistently failed to keep up ever since.
At first, this didn't change much. If you were raising a family in the 80s, you were putting just a little bit more of your earnings towards necessities. You could still afford baseball and piano lessons and a family vacation and newer cars. You didn't live much different than your parents.
The problem is, if you are constantly failing short, year over year, the small difference each year compounds. So now, a very large part of earnings go to just food, shelter, and transportation.
I'm in my 40s, no kids, a good paying job. Well above average. And I don't eat out. Why? Because it's a waste of money. I'm trying to save money for my nieces and nephews college. To help them with their first house. Without that generational wealth / generational help, the pathway to success for a kid now compared to a kid 25 and 50 years ago is so much harder. So don't blame the kids. Blame greedy boomers and then greedy Gen-X that just copied the boomers. This may be broken in a way that can't be fixed. At the very least, the fix will be painful and lengthy. 50 years to get here, can't be undone in a year.
