Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
Who will enact this grand plan though? Lawyers? Politicians? Scientists? Congressional funding controls all of those, and already-known facts are choosing to be ignored right this very second. So yeah, very few here will disagree with you that disinformation should not be prosecuted - what people are saying is that there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. How to get it DONE?
But far, Far, FAR worse than that even, asking Congress to do this for us would be… significantly worse than not doing that. Congress will use this tool as a weapon to enact the precise and exact opposite of what you say: instead of shutting down the dis-information sources, they will shut down the pro-information ones. Remember all the rhetoric against Fauci? Politicians care about facts, if and only when they can use them to further their own agendas.
Congress is the very source of much of the disinformation going around right now. They aren’t going to stop simply b/c we ask nicely. Nor are they likely to cooperate. Instead, if what you are saying were proposed as a law, they are likely to simply gladly accept the gift that we offered them, then proceed to bash our heads in with it.
That is my own two cents anyway. And as you can see, I am not terribly trusting:-). For example, China is doing exactly what you are proposing - though young people there do not seem terribly happy with the results:-(.