@AZjeff
Greetings.
The biggest concern, and it is of critical importance, is the nation's debt and deficit. Currently, our nation is reported to borrow monies just to make the interest payment on the debt. I can't play a single scenario where this ends up ok down the road. When you and I were kids, politicians were challenged on fiscal responsibility of the federal government. That is without a doubt no longer an issue of concern for voters.
In 2015 I taught a class at a top 30 rated university. Part of the syllabus was could ISIS become a force in the U.S. When I surveyed these very smart young adults, the immediate and resounding answer was a powerful
NO. To get accepted into this private university, one needed a very high SAT, great high school grades, well rounded (like high school athlete), etc. Almost all of these students came from comfortable financial backgrounds and nice public or private schools.
After the ISIS survey, I would go line by line into entitlements. What would happen if the federal government would no longer be able to pay these entitlements. After going through the entitlements, loss of entitlements, and no hope for young men......... the students changed their position that not only could ISIS (or like organization) be a force in the US, but it would happen very quickly.
To answer your question, unless the government reduces entitlements, increases exports, decreases imports, increases adult employment participation rate, and increases adults that pay taxes....... I think it is prudent on look at living in a location that they can survive, feed their family, and protect their family.
Increase exports? Sounds good (and easy!) in theory, but what industries? Where's the supply chain for those industries? Politicians like to talk big about manufacturing iphones etc in the US, but if you actually were to break down the cost of manufacturing all of those components (of which there are many) in the US, the phones would be several thousand dollars at minimum. And it would take many years to actually build that supply chain which no longer exists (and in many cases, never did) and train a workforce.
There are some possible spots of hope, but people should stop kidding themselves about what can actually be made here. Cars? Only if we actually start building cars other countries would actually want to buy. Does anyone seriously think Japan wants Ford F-150s? I promise you as someone that spends considerable time there, they do not. They certainly don't want Expeditions, Tahoes, etc (well, outside of a very select, special group which is growing less relevant by the year, and those are the same people who also give bulletproof glass industry a shot in the arm, pun intended).
The US steel industry is a possible spot of hope right now, it's as cyclical as it's ever been. And right now, a lot of the older folks (a large percentage of the userbase on this site) are underestimating the impact that AI will and is having. As much as many of us hate it, and think the LLM model (think chatGPT, Gemini, etc) is inherently flawed and useless, there are lots of positions that are rapidly being replaced by technology and AI, and those are the places that historically are filled by young people.
You can whinge and say "young people don't want to work anymore!" I can show you a hilarious compilation of newspaper articles going back literally hundreds of years where people said the exact same thing, and it's not any truer now than it was then. The unemployment rate among recent college grads is over 25% in most of the country, because those entry level jobs have disappeared. You want to get rid of entitlements, is that going to magically reappear those jobs which have vanished into the ether?
It's easy to say "we need to cut entitlements so people want to work" Work where? How much are those jobs paying? Sure, Harbor Freight might always have hiring signs up, but will that job pay enough to pay rent in this country? This isn't Japan, where even in a major city like Tokyo or Fukuoka you can find apartments for less than $500/mo. Good luck finding anything remotely that cheap in most of the US.
You want people to have kids? With what money? With what time, when they're working 2 or 3 jobs just to pay rent for themselves? Again, it's easy to say "cut entitlements, increase exports". Sure, now give me some concrete ideas how you plan on doing those things while considering the possible consequences for others. "build stuff in the US", okay, as I said earlier, you don't have supply chains or raw materials for those things. You don't have a skilled labor pool to do those jobs, almost no companies/jobs do internships or traineeships anymore to learn those jobs, even if they existed.
It's an unpopular opinion, but I think little of the country (or the west in general) has woken up to the notion that our current economic system is inherently incompatible with the current trajectory of the world and economy. This isn't the 1950s, you can't just "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and walk into a place and ask for a job".
