Move over Gen X and Y and go away millennials: gen U is here: generation unemployment. As the stats show, all over the western world it’s young workers who are paying the price for the economic crisis. Things didn’t look too good before 2008, but since then the spiral of economic depression and harsh saving measures by governments desperate to cut their way out of the crisis have hit young people hard. It’s not so bad in the Netherlands at the moment as it is elsewhere, but I do have the feeling that’s that because we’ve been in the eye of the storm and only now are going to feel the full brunt of it. We were lucky that when the crisis first hit, we still had a relatively moderate coalition governing the Netherlands that didn’t quite have the same neoliberal instinct to cut spending as our current minority rightwing government supported by fascists has. Didn’t mean that they did very much to combat the crisis in any recognisable Keynsian fashion, but they did put through several measures to dampen the worse effects of it.
No such luck anymore. We now have the same sort of government as every other European country, either slavering to start cutting everything they’ve disagreed with for decades, the crisis providing the perfect excuse for it, or forced to by the pressures of the financial markets and their fellow EU countries. So everybody’s cutting spending while the depression gets worse and of course it’s the most vulnerable, especially the young, who bear the brunt of it.
(Statistics via Mr Wonkish.)