Here's another hard truth.
People had a whole fuckton of babies after WWII and their babies had babies and so forth. Simultaneously there have been several technological revolutions. Now we have an overpopulated society wherein more and more jobs become obsolete over time due to technology, and cultural perception has had a hard time keeping up to date.
Additionally, post-secondary education turned into a money vacuum because all of the temporarily embarassed billionaires of America think that a degree is a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Cocaine and Bugatti factory. So people kinda just let the banks keep adding zeros to their loans because everyone says that the financial buttfucking is totally worth it. Kids aren't going to complain about being sent away to get drunk and fuck for 4 years. 18 year olds definitely don't feel the gravity of 5 or 6 figure debt.
Alright so now there's too many people. Computers and robotics limit the need to paid laborers and advance more rapidly by the day. The young people are in debt. Half of them have borderline useless degrees, while the rest are trying to get jobs that are either absurdly competitive or will never open up because the tenured old fucks can't retire.
Ideally these people will eventually have decent careers. But even so, how do they survive in the meantime? Probably via whatever low wage bullshit supported them through college. Without benefits of course. And capped at 25 hours/week. So now they need a second bullshit wage job and maybe even government assistance.
Suddenly they're a drain on taxpayer money through EBT and wellfare. They don't have extra spending cash so they aren't doing much for the economy. And god forbid they get hurt or sick, because you know damn well that they can't cover the medical bills.
And people born into poverty? Well they got a shitty roll of the dice and had to skip the college part of the game. Some of em went straight to the parenthood part by accident and get to raise families on $8 an hour, which isn't even sufficient for one person, let alone several. Doesn't leave a whole lot of free time for people to raise upsranding citizens; it doesn't take long for a hopeless kid to realize that in an hour of dealing drugs, he makes twice the amount of his mom's weekly Walmart wages.
Then people bitch about the lukewarm economy and social programs and taxes. But we can't make corporations pay their employees a respectable wage... Because they dont have respectable jobs? It isn't like most jobs can be dumbed down beyond comprehension if a company has enough money to dump into technology and micro management.
Walmart made a 482 billion dollar profit last year. Walmart pays 3 million employees. If everyone at Walmart magically had a collective stroke and gave all of the annual profits to their employees, everyone would get a bonus check of a little over $160,600 and the company would still be able to operate normally. But that will never ever happen in this universe, so maybe the goverment should raise the minimum wage.