Strapped
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Drowning in student loans? Can’t afford to get married, buy a home, have children? Up to your ears in credit card debt? At last, a book for the under-35 generation that explains why it’s not their fault, and what can be done about it. Strapped offers a groundbreaking look at the new obstacle course facing young adults. Getting ahead, argues commentator and policy maven Tamara Draut, is getting harder. A college degree is the new high school diploma–and costs a fortune to obtain. Good jobs are scarcer thanks to stagnant wages and disappearing benefits. And, the cost of everything–starter homes, health coverage, child care–keeps going up. Witty and wise, Strapped brims with ideas for fashioning a new kind of America in which every young person can go to college, buy a home, and start a family. The future starts here.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's hard to believe: "Today's college grads are making less than the college grads of thirty years ago." In fact, men aged 25 to 34 with bachelor's degrees are making just $6,000 more than those with high school diplomas did in 1972. This is just one of the many shocking statistics uncovered by Draut, a think-tank adviser and media pundit, in this incisive and revealing look at why today's young adults find financial independence so difficult. With catchy terms such as "debt-for-diploma" and "paycheck paralysis," Draut shows why this age group's ability to accomplish the traditional adult markers of school, career and family is stagnating. Her presentation features the one-two punch of well-sourced data and a series of stories from a diverse group of interview subjects to prove her thesis that depressed wages, inflated educational costs, soaring credit card debt and skyrocketing health and child-care expenses present nearly insurmountable obstacles to young adults' success. While Draut's conclusions take conservative politicians to task, they are hardly polemical, and her analysis and solutions are refreshingly free of glib how-to advice. Her book should be a jarring wake-up call to both the generation affected most by the current economic reality and the policy makers facing the consequences for decades to come.
