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Statistics could prove we are the Last Lucky Generation

By Kenneth Kowald

One night, many years ago, a friend of ours said to me, “We are the last lucky generation.”

Charles, who died more than a year ago, grew up in Broadway-Flushing. He lived in a house on 171st Street, down the block from Flushing Cemetery. He was a graduate of PS 107, The Bayside High School — he always called it that — and Queens College. He took a graduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis and went on to other graduate work at Cornell University. His field was English and he taught at Adelphi University and elsewhere. He worked in what we now call communications in city and state government and for nonprofit agencies.

Neither he nor I ever had a problem finding a job. I think my longest wait was when I came out of the U.S. Army and I got a job within two weeks.

Charles was three years younger than I, so we were of the same generation. He said those words long before the tech bubble burst and before the Great Recession. He was not married and had no children, but he worried about his nephews and niece and others of the younger generation.

Did he usually see the glass half-empty? I’m not sure. As a Pollyanna, despite much evidence to the contrary, I see the glass half-full.

But the words he spoke that night come back to me again as this country grapples with a future that seems grimmer than any past eras, even the Great Depression. Somehow, it seems, in that time there was hope and people helped each other. I see — and I imagine many of you do, too — not too much hope and less of the helping spirit these days.

Consider the following:

• Workers’ salaries are at the lowest percentage of GDP since 1929, when they began to be measured.

• Corporate tax rates remain below the longterm average.

• Between 2009 and 2012, income for the top 1 percent rose 31 percent, while income of the bottom 40 percent fell 6 percent.

• Median household income is the equivalent of what it was in the late 1980s.

• From 2004-10, members of Congress saw their median net worth rise by 15 percent, while overall Americans saw a drop of 8 percent. The median net worth of lawmakers is $966,000.

• The U.S. Census Bureau noted that nearly 1.2 million people age 65 and up were “extremely poor” last year.

• Between 2010 and 2012, there was a 4.2 percent decline in local and state government spending on such needs as highways and schools. This was the largest decline for any two-year period since the early 1950s, when we were demobilizing after the Korean War.

• A report by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that American adults lag behind their counterparts in other developed countries in the math and technical skills needed for a modern workplace. Young adults also are behind in literacy.

Was Charles right? Is what is happening now “the new normal”?

Am I and many of you part of the Last Lucky Generation?

What has happened to our country since World War II? Why has it happened? What can be done about it?

Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?

Read my blog No Holds Barred at timesledger.com.