The Young and Debt

The Christian Science Moniter reports:

Tamara Draut and Stuart Fink didn't expect it to come to this. After eight years of marriage, the couple found themselves with less than a dollar and with three days until the next paycheck. Seated on the living room floor, they sorted through their compact discs, choosing ones to sell.

"We never imagined we'd be peddling our wares for food money at the age of 30," Ms. Draut says. A combination of graduate school tuition, meager salaries, unemployment, a career change, and the cost of setting up housekeeping had drained their modest resources.

Straitened circumstances are becoming more familiar to those in their 20s and 30s as they try to get a foothold on the American Dream. Student loans, depressed wages, rising healthcare costs, and soaring housing prices are creating new economic realities. Sixty percent of young adults between 18 and 34 are struggling for financial independence, says Draut, now the director of the economic opportunity program at Demos, a think tank in New York. She is also the author of a new book, "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead."

It's amazing how Big Brother subsidizing college loans and housing prices have made things rather unaffordable.Maybe government should get out of those industries.