You're conflating lack of opportunity with artificial scarcity. The US is in a position where it spent trillions of dollars to educate young people, but then s

You're conflating lack of opportunity with artificial scarcity. The US is in a position where it spent trillions of dollars to educate young people, but then saddled them with a trillion dollars in student loans. So rather than being able to start businesses or have the breathing room to join professional organizations or otherwise build their careers gradually like in the past, graduates are forced to jump into student loan payback within 6 months or a year of graduation. This isn't necessarily a new thing. For example, my dad was a dentist and our family struggled financially until I was about 15 (20 years after he graduated from dental school). This was due to the excessive cost of lab supplies in the medical industry, and a corrupt scheme where suppliers lend money to young practices at exorbitant interest and fees. Someone is always trying to get a piece of the action. We should reform student loans to be the way that Stripe is doing it. A flat fee on the order of about 10% added to the original loan amount, then 0% interest for the life of the loan, and a maximum repayment each month of perhaps 5-20% of declared income. That way college graduates could explore their career space, potentially for years, and then pay back their loans after they're established and actually have income. Better yet, go back to how it used to be before Ronald Reagan and fund college publicly, and put more resources into building new campuses. The money for that is there, it's just been misappropriated for the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big pharma, the war on drugs, you get the picture. My generation (gen x) thought that war was over after Vietnam, and we certainly didn't vote for any war on drugs, or foresee the return of racism/sexism/nationalism or that essentially all of the federal government's disposable income would go to tax breaks for the wealthy and increase the national debt to the point where our children and grandchildren would be poorer than us. ^^^ This was a grave concern of the founding fathers, who realized that one generation could run up the debt and enslave the next generation without their permission, effectively disenfranchising them, which is illegal as there is no taxation without representation, so that presents an existential threat to our union as serious as colonialism. I've been watching this same song and dance since I was a kid in the 80s, and my parents spoke often about how devastating it was to their generation when JFK, RFK and MLK were assassinated and Nixon got elected. Heck some people reading this weren't even born yet when 9/11 happened. Believe it or not, there was a time before this decades-long Middle East war swallowed the money that was going to pay for your future. Which is why I think that all of this is by design. Artificial scarcity begets income inequality begets class strife begets political division begets the rise of a new global aristocracy.