The Next America Quotes

“America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“In recent years a smaller share of young adults has been employed than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking such trends in 1948. So it's not surprising that this generation of youthful protesters has a different focus for their grievances: the economy, stupid. But notice the targets they've chosen to demonize. It's all about class, not age. It's 1% versus 99%, not young versus old. Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Leisure World.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“some of the study’s inputs and weighting variables, but the story it tells is consistent with what policy analysts of all ideological stripes in the US have been saying for decades: we’re robbing the future to pay for the present.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Yes, there are still “explosionists” concerned that an overpopulated planet will deplete the earth’s resources, but they now share the stage with “implosionists” troubled by a world of too few young supporting too many old.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“be telling a story and they’re nodding along with one-word semi-responses but I know that half of my story has been lost because their attention is mostly focused on whatever they’re texting about or reading on”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“More than two-thirds of American adults and more than 80% of Millennials create content through social networking sites, other social media, and their various rankings, ratings, commenting, and remixing applications”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“today’s teens and young will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who treat the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Asian Americans are the highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the US. They are more satisfied than the general public with their lives, finances, and the direction of the country, and they place more value than other Americans do on marriage, parenthood, hard work, and career success.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Millennials have starkly different expectations. More than 7 in 10 (72%) Millennials do not expect Social Security to be their main source of retirement income. In fact, 42% of Millennials think they will get no retirement income from Social Security at all, as do 35% of Generation Xers. While around 1 in 5 Baby Boomers (22%) say they are already retired, most are not, and their expectations about Social Security are mixed.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“nearly a third (31%) of non-retired adults think they will end up getting no money from Social Security in their retirement.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Absent changes to current law, more than half of the federal budget will go to Social Security, Medicare, and the nonchild portion of Medicaid by 2022,”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Millennials have known a mix of good and bad fortune. By lottery of birth timing, they’re the world’s first generation of digital natives. Adapting to new technology is hardwired into their generational DNA”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Thirty percent of all men ages 18 to 34 (and 22% of all young women that age) were living in their parents’ homes in 2012, the highest share in modern history.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you’d be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“The factory of the future will have just two workers,” goes the gallows humor in manufacturing towns. “A man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog. The dog is there to make sure the man keeps his hands off the equipment.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“The America of the early twenty-first century is undergoing two dramatic demographic overhauls at the same time. Our population is en route to becoming majority nonwhite at the same time a record share is turning gray.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Basing a [retirement] system on people’s voluntarily saving for 40 years and evaluating the relevant information for sound investment choices is like asking the family pet to dance on two legs,” writes Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement policy expert at the New School for Social Research. “First, figure out when you or your spouse will be laid off or be too sick to work. Second, figure out when you will die. Third, understand you need to save 7 percent of every dollar you earn. Fourth, earn at least 3 percent above inflation on your investments. Fifth, do not withdraw any funds when you lose your job, have a health problem, get divorced, buy a house or send a kid to college. Sixth, time your retirement account withdrawals so the last cent is spent on the day you die.”2 Most”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Among supporters of same-sex marriage in 2013, fully 28% said they were once opponents. Asked why they changed their minds, no one cited changing attitudes about marriage. Instead, the most common response was that familiarity had led to acceptance. Nearly 9 in 10 Americans (87%) now say they know someone who is gay or lesbian, up from 61% in 1993, and about half (49%) say a close friend or family member is gay or lesbian.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“The US is already home to four times more immigrants than any other nation in the world.16 Political backlashes notwithstanding, we have a long and mostly happy history of bringing them in and helping them become American.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“In 2012, Millennials made up 25.5% of the age-eligible electorate but only cast about 20% of the votes (enough, however, to rescue Obama from defeat). By 2020, they will be 36.5% of the age-eligible electorate, and, if history is a guide, as they enter middle age, their turnout rates will rise as well.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“In the shout-fest that passes for public discourse these days, politicians and pundits frequently claim to speak for the public.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Once you get far enough along in life, you’re likely to be struck by the distance between the views in front of you and the ones you can still dimly make out in your rear-view mirror. I turn 65 this year. The America of my childhood—with its expanding middle class, secure jobs, intact nuclear families, devout believers, distinct gender roles, polite politics, consensus-building media—is nothing like the country my year-old granddaughter will inherit.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“writes Michael Barone, author of a 2013 book on the impact of immigrants on politics.1”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”
― Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown