To College Grads: It's A Different Economy 05/04/2013 Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
"The economy has changed in structural ways; preparing for the old economy is a sure path to disappointment.
Millions of young people will be graduating from college over the next four years, and unfortunately, they will be entering an economy that has changed in structural ways for the worse.
1. Getting a college degree, even in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects, no longer guarantees a job.
2. Those millions of Baby Boomers clinging to their jobs can't afford to retire, partly as a result of Federal Reserve bubble-blowing and zero-interest rates.
3. Many of those Boomers clinging to jobs are doing so to support you.
4. We now have a bifurcated economy:we have what's left of the open-market economy and we have the cartel-state economy of various rentier arrangements. A rentier arrangement is one in which the input costs can keep rising due to political power/protection while the output declines. . . . Rentier arrangements include the financial sector (hated by the public but politically sacrosanct), the National Security State (you can never have enough people spying on the world, including Americans), healthcare (costs triple while the availability of care and the health of the populace decline) and education (college tuition rises 600% when adjusted for inflation but a third of the graduates learned essentially nothing).
5. The private-sector economy is bifurcated as well.
6. The older generations will have to adjust to demographic and financial realities.
7. There are two sets of laws now: one for the Elites and the state, and one for the rest of us . . . The rule of law has been undermined by corruption, political favoritism, and mindless regulation. That systemic failure leads to stagnation and cynicism.
8. We are a free-lance nation
There is a price to joining a parasitic rentier arrangement, a loss of integrity, agency and independence. Complicity in an unsustainable neofeudal society has a cost. "
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Sat May 04, 2013 3:04 pm
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