re: Voters 18-30

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Jucos and Community College cut the cost of a college degree in almost half.

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Yeah. That comes with the price of not learning anything for two years and still having a college degree.

The solution isn’t more college degrees. It’s probably radically re-envisioning what college is and what a degree needs to be comprised of.

You could cut the fluff out of a degree and cut 1 year out of it, easily. There’s no reason for an electrical engineer to take 20 hours of liberal arts.

ETA: for an education degree, you could add a senior year practicum with students working in the schools and earning while finishing their degree.

The options are endless. But the universities aren’t interested in less money. So you’ll have to ram some of this down their throat. Changing loan options is a start.

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Well, why should we do it? Firstly part of it is just going to have to be regular parts of infrastructure spending. It is money that is likely going to be spent regardless, and there are lots of areas that could use direct investment. Second, there has to be some effort to keep capital flowing to areas which need it. There are some parts to this argument, but effectively, some key acts that deregulated certain industries, rail, ocean shipping, trucking, helped concentrate freight and port investment in a few coastal gateways. The end result is that we have heavily incentivized investment of several areas on the coast which were very wealthy to begin with and those areas have not been able to keep up with the increased population. Unfortunately, it seems that local councils are unable to keep up with consistent but small increases in population with building projects which can accommodate a possibly larger population in the future.

If you are asking why people who feel left out should buy in, mainly the incentive should be economic, as economics is the most important thing to lots of people.

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I totally agree with you, it's sensible

But I'm interested in your take - is "let's do this hard, paradigm-shift thing for aggregate economic reasons" going to work? If anyone can identify a historic precedent for something like that without some other type of thick bond to drive a massive policy push - it's you (I don't know that it exists).

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Idk i guess my circle is that I’m not around poor people

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Maybe you’re just not around young people?

I don’t hang around many young folks nor am I poor. But I’m smart enough to know that I can’t just see the world through my eyes to conclude as to why an election went a certain way

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My daughter and son-in-law are making about 8X what my wife and I made coming out of college. They’re both in the first 5 years of their career.

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now factor in the cost of living in today’s world compared to when yall started.

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That group is tired of being told how good the economy is when their own reality is the opposite.

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No, that group wants a 4 day work week - where they "work" from home - and make 500,000 a year for basically playing video games.

They will turn against the Dems in the next cycle because they won't get their "dream job" with them either.

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But I'm interested in your take - is "let's do this hard, paradigm-shift thing for aggregate economic reasons" going to work? If anyone can identify a historic precedent for something like that without some other type of thick bond to drive a massive policy push - it's you (I don't know that it exists).

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In terms of creating a new ethic replacing an older, more regional one? The precedent would be the New Deal. Some of the granular readings about it are fascinating, where some programs have wide leeway to achieve some objective and the people involved, which by definition was made up of a coalition of labor unions, blue-collar working class workers, racial minorities and white southerners. The latter group was eventually stopped support over a series of years, as nothing could really undo the fact that the mass of labor forces in the Northeast, which a massive portion of the US population lived, made siding with white southerners less and less necessary. The erosion of white southerners support in the coalition happened well after the New Deal, though the skeleton of the New Deal coalition remained a force up until Trump in 2016.

The 'New South' is a much different place. It is an easy place to expand, has plentiful ports and could easily see the same benefits of the same trend of capital concentration to places like Mobile and New Orleans. Why Mobile and New Orleans did not get the same container capital is another story, but you could see the development of those areas resulting in a large urban infill, likely from Baton Rouge to Pensacola, if it does happen.

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No, that group wants a 4 day work week - where they "work" from home - and make 500,000 a year for basically playing video games.

They will turn against the Dems in the next cycle because they won't get their "dream job" with them either.

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100 percent this. I work from home and still work 60 hours a week or more. Being on salary has its pros and cons.

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Mobile is exploding. Their economy has grown by $2B in 4 years.

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Yes, but I believe that is due to the timing of a few things. It's first container port opened in 2008, and with the Panama Canal expansion in 2016, it made the channel deepening project more viable, which was also recently finished.

In the initial movement of capital concentration, I'd argue that places like Houston and Savannah were the big winners in the South, and Mobile became more and more attractive after the 216 Panama Canal expansion. Mobile is a good site for massive investment as well. It sits at a nice crossroads, can expand west easily, has a nice bay area in Baldwin County as an addition to the metropolitan areas.

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Yeah. That comes with the price of not learning anything for two years and still having a college degree.

The solution isn’t more college degrees. It’s probably radically re-envisioning what college is and what a degree needs to be comprised of.

You could cut the fluff out of a degree and cut 1 year out of it, easily. There’s no reason for an electrical engineer to take 20 hours of liberal arts.

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I don't disagree with any of this. Some of the most obvious solutions aren't even in the government sphere - like requiring a college degree for a secretarial job.

But the overall point remains - there is a significant problem with the economic opportunity for young Americans and the GOP is losing the battle on this. And, what's worse, they aren't losing to an opponent that has better ideas; democrat economic policies are inflation bombs that make things worse. The GOP is losing because the don't acknowledge and attempt to address the problem.