youth

This is a bad time to be a young American. As Ben Casselman writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps no group has been hit harder by the recession and grinding recovery than the young. The official unemployment rate for those under age 25 is 16.2%, more than double the rate for the population as a whole. In percentage terms, unemployment has fallen far more slowly for young people than for the wider population.

Furthermore, as this piece by Jordan Weissmann in the Atlantic reports, it is almost as though the young are being singled out for special treatment.

Each generation of Americans has suffered in its own way during these post-recession years, but only one age group has managed to go the past year without reducing its unemployment rate. It's 20-to-24-year olds.

The young are supposedly a key element of President Obama's constituency.  They will be happy to learn that the president has a plan. According to White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer:

“What the president will not do is come in right after getting reelected and enact a Romney economic plan ..." 

What a relief.

Among the more trenchant lines from Paul Ryan's speech was this:

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

London—Trying to return to Hackney, five minutes from the heart of the protests, from vacation on the night the rioting was at its fiercest provided an insight into the carnage engulfing London. The city had been transformed into a kind of Alan Moore dystopia. Sirens were deafening, with bright lights blinding. Train operators announced gravely that there had been “civil unrest” across London, and that some areas of the city were no longer safe.