The Boomers popped out from ’46 to the early ’60s. GenX started to be born in either ’62 or ’64 (although there’s a question if Barack Obama and David Poland are old GenX or young Boomer). GenX ended roughly 20 years later, and then along came GenY in the early to mid ’80s. Except the highly perceptive and literal-minded Bill Moyers doesn’t call them GenY but Millennials, and he says they began to be born in ’78. Who decided that? A generation that began to be born the year that Some Girls was released…odd.

However you slice it and whatever you call them, the GenY Millennials are paupers on the job market, and certainly screwed in terms of college debt.

“There are 80-plus-million Millennials,” Moyers states. “60 percent are white, 14 percent black, 19 percent Latino, five percent Asian, and a smattering of others. Here is something of what they’re up against:

“Unemployment among our youngest adults is almost twice the national average. 25 to 34 year-old male high school graduates are earning 25 percent less than they earned in 1980. Almost 40 percent of young adults say their personal debt increased in the last four years, a lot of that directly related to student loans.

“Back in 1980, college tuition averaged three thousand dollars, adjusted for inflation. Today that average has almost tripled.

“Back then, pell grants covered more than two-thirds of the cost for low income students. Today it’s down to just over one-third. And those who graduate are in debt an average of 25 thousand dollars.”

My oldest son Jett, a gradate of Syracuse University, owes a bit less than four times that amount. He has to make a monthly college loan payment of over $700 bucks.