If there’s one thing I love, it’s a good, old-fashioned treatise on millennials.
Hard news? Op-ed? A stranger shouting and pointing? It doesn’t matter to me, as long as by the end, I’ve learned another way that millennials have A) Ruined something; B) Used technology in a way baby boomers don’t understand; C) Made financial decisions that baby boomers don’t understand, thus ruining products like credit cards; D) Ruined two things at once, like avocados and toast.
As a millennial, I feel like Generation Y should get at least some credit for ruining American culture, but I digress. What I’m here to dig into today is an old-fashioned millennial takedown, Fox News style. Because to millennials, the words of Fox News are like that of Moses, freshly descended from the mount. What wisdom hast thou for me today?
Fox News writers and talking heads hate a lot of things, but one of their favorite things to hate is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ubiquitous Democrat from New York. They hate her so much that sometimes I wonder if they are secretly trying to promote her because of how much coverage she receives. Or maybe it’s an SEO thing.
Either way, Ocasio-Cortez made a statement that her generation has never experienced American prosperity, leading conservative writer and Gen Xer Carol Roth to write this piece suggesting millennials wouldn’t know prosperity if it bit them in the ass.
I wrote here about how Roth follows a long line of older generations dismissing millennials’ legitimate concerns about the economy and things like rising inequality. Here, I’d like to go over some of the facts in her piece.
Fact or fiction: Did the United States have a 2.9 percent economic growth last year?
Last year, our gross domestic product increased by 2.9 percent, but that number narrowly missed the Trump administration’s goal of 3 percent. It also falls short of the 4 percent annual increase to the GDP that President Donald Trump promised before the election.
Some additional context: Economists project that the government shutdown that ended in January will negatively impact the GDP for the first quarter of this year.
Fact or fiction: Is unemployment low and are wages up?
The unemployment rate for March stood at 3.8 percent, far lower than the Great Recession’s peak of 10 percent. However, some economists argue the way the number is calculated can understate the number of people who are actually unemployed, while others say unemployment figures alone aren’t a great reflection of how well the economy is doing.
As far as wages go, according to the Pew Research Center, before the Great Recession, hourly wages tended to increase by 4 percent annually, and they often rose 7 to 9 percent annually during the 1970s and 1980s. Since 2013, wage growth has gone up by 2 to 3 percent each year, less than in the past and at a time when Americans’ purchasing power is down. Also, wage growth has increased the most among Americans who already earn the most.
Fact or fiction: Is life expectancy up in the United States?
This claim really surprised me because, to the contrary, Americans’ average life expectancy has gone down for three years in a row – ironically while global life expectancy is going up.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the decrease to drug overdoses, which reached a staggering 70,237 in 2017, and suicide, which has been on the rise for 20 years.
Fact or fiction: Are deaths from cancer and heart disease down?
In recent years, deaths from heart disease are up. In 2016, 635,260 people died due to heart disease, up from 596,577 in 2011. However, deaths from heart disease are down overall from a peak in 1985 of about 771,000 deaths.
Deaths from cancer have increased in recent years and also historically, almost tripling from 1950 to the 2010s. In 2016, 598,038 people died due to cancer, up from 576,691 in 2011.
Note: American Mythology is a new weekly series where we factcheck an entire piece or debunk a topic across multiple publications or platforms. You can learn more about our approach to factchecking here.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
An excerpt from this piece also ran in our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up for Hard Reset here.