On the menu today: The message from the angry young Groypers is that America is devoid of economic opportunities, that there is no path to a better life, and that the whole American way of life should be burned to the ground. Even a casual look at the actual numbers of our economy refutes this self-defeating, self-pitying doomsaying. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to insist that prices are down since he took office, which is . . . not accurate. Read on.
America, Still the Land of Opportunity, Even in an Off Year
A whole lot of people in the conservative media world are buzzing about Rod Dreher’s assessment of the young men who are entranced by the alt-right, or Groypers, Nick Fuentes, extremism, antisemitism, etc.
I just want to focus on two points in Dreher’s troubling, thought-provoking essay. The first is the sense of these angry young men that they have no economic prospects and no path to a better future, and thus, there’s nothing in modern American society worth preserving; the whole thing should be burned to the ground:
I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”
Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.
I cannot control your “vibes,” or your perception of things, or your own personal experience, or the consequences of your own actions and decisions.
I can only point to data.
If you want to go to college, there is a good chance that you will have options. It is actually getting easier to get into most institutions of higher education. From an American Enterprise Institute study of college admission rates from September 2024:
Though elite schools with single-digit admissions rates dominate headlines, it’s important to remember that most colleges accept a majority of applicants. In 2022, just 13 percent of nonprofit four-year colleges rejected more than half of their applicants. On the other hand, an equal proportion of these schools — 13 percent — reported an open enrollment policy.
From The Hechinger Report, about one year ago:
Separate data from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, shows that 78 percent of first-year applicants to public and 70 percent to private colleges and universities get in. That’s up from 68 percent and 65 percent, respectively, since 2014.
You may not get into the college of your dreams, but the odds are very good that you can get accepted to a college that will suit your needs and prepare you for the working world. And if you have your heart set on a particular school, you can study hard at another school, get good grades, and attempt to transfer to your dream school. And this is before we get into the “enrollment cliff” that will force colleges to be less selective.
If you want to go to college but find the costs daunting, more than 1.8 million scholarships from private sources are awarded annually. This adds up over $8.2 billion in scholarship money annually.
According to the SoFi financial services company, “Nearly $100 million in scholarships and $2 billion in student grants go unclaimed annually, often due to a lack of applicants. Scholarships and grants do not typically require repayment, acting as financial gifts for education.” (If you’re someone who would like to apply for those scholarships, they offer a list of 6,439 scholarships here.)
Besides all the usual categories, there is a $1,000 scholarship for being tall. There is a $2,000 scholarship for those who think seriously about zombie apocalypses. There are scholarships for those who promote veganism and for beef advocates.
Let’s just pause and recognize that you live in a country where so many people are so generous that thousands upon thousands of scholarship programs exist. Some only offer $1,000, some offer tens of thousands of dollars per year. Some are location-based, some are curriculum-based, some are need based, some require essays and detailed applications, and all of them have annual deadlines. But they are opportunities. If you do not apply for help, you cannot complain that no one is willing to help you.
According to a 2024 analysis by the National College Attainment Network, the high school class of 2023 left more than $4 billion in Pell Grants on the table by not completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. (In their defense, the allegedly new and improved FAFSA system was full of glitches that year.) Pell Grants are not loans; they are awards of up to $7,395 in the 2025-2026 school year who can demonstrate “exceptional financial need.”
This isn’t even counting the separate federal Work-Study Program which attempts to set students up with a part-time job to help pay for college; it provides roughly $1 billion annually to about 600,000 students on more than 3,000 campuses nationwide. Keep in mind, President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought called the federally funded program “a handout to woke universities and a subsidy from federal taxpayers, who can pay for their own employees.”
But let’s say a four-year degree program is not right for you.
There are high-paying jobs that do not require a college degree. As of 2024, aircraft and avionics equipment mechanics and technicians have a median salary of $79,140 per year. Electrical power-line installers and repairers have a median salary of $92,560 per year. Elevator and escalator technicians have a median salary of $106,580 per year.
(Median salary means half the people in the group make more than that number, and half make less than that. Salary levels are influenced by the company, by experience, by location, by skill level, and in some cases, how well the employee can negotiate a higher salary. I know that after this is posted, someone on social media will say the above numbers are a lie because they know an elevator technician who makes much less than $106,000 per year. This also happens whenever I mention the national average price for a gallon of gas.)
Commercial pilots need a high school diploma, FAA certifications, and flight training, which can cost $55,000 to $100,000. But that investment in yourself can pay off; in 2024, the median salary of a commercial pilot was $198,100 per year.
If you can get an associate’s degree, you can work in some jobs in medicine and health care — MRI technologists, sonographers, dental hygienists, nuclear medicine technologists, and radiation therapists have median salaries ranging from $88,180 to $101,990 in 2024.
And look, being an air traffic controller can be a stressful job, and when one party in Congress is feeling foolish and stubborn, you can go unpaid for roughly one Lent. But the median salary in 2024 was $144,580 per year.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. had 7.2 million job openings in August. That’s actually down a little bit from the 7.7 million at the beginning of the year, but that’s still high by historical standards. If you are frustrated with your current level of pay, you are sometimes (often?) more valuable to another company than the one where you currently work.
And a few years ago, BLS took a crack at projecting which industries will have the most new jobs created between 2023 and 2033. “home health and personal care aides (+6.7 million jobs), software developers (+304,000 jobs), restaurant cooks (+245,000 jobs) and registered nurses (+197,000 jobs). The fastest-growing occupations — measured by percentage increase in jobs — include wind turbine service technician (+60 percent) and solar photovoltaic installers (+48 percent), nurse practitioners (+46 percent) and data scientists (+36 percent).”
Now, to find these jobs, you may have to be willing to move to where the jobs are. You’ve probably heard that Texas and Florida are booming, and they are — but they also have more people moving there and looking for jobs and filling them quickly. As of July 2025, states like Oklahoma, Michigan, West Virginia, Alaska, Minnesota, and New Mexico have the most job openings, according to the BLS.
While many companies are getting employees back into the office after Covid, remote jobs are still more than 15 percent of new employment opportunities — more than three times the percentage before the pandemic.
If you are a young person in America today, you have more opportunities to improve the quality of your life, economically and otherwise, than roughly 99.9 percent of all other human beings that ever walked this earth. The United States of America, even in a bad year, even under policies that are suboptimal, is still the greatest place for opportunity on this earth. Nobody’s jumping onto a rickety raft to sail through shark-infested waters to get from Miami to Cuba.
Also . . . no one ever said that achieving the American dream was going to be easy. No politician is coming to save you. The person who has the most influence over your quality of life is you.
There was a kerfuffle over Ben Shapiro recently saying, “If you are a young person and you can’t afford to live here [in New York City], then maybe you should not live here.”
The city’s policies deserve plenty of criticism, particularly its policies relating to housing construction. But New York City has the highest cost of living in the country, and it has competed for that crown for a long, long time. It is less than surprising that young people, who are starting their careers and usually making less, would find it hard to afford living there. Are the Mamdani people really arguing that if New York City does not offer them the job they want, at the salary they want, in the location they want, then somehow capitalism, America, or modern society has failed them?
As for the second point I want to address, later in the essay, Dreher writes:
They don’t even take Trump all that seriously, it appears. They see him as an out-of-touch Boomer whose value lies in how he can be used to achieve the system’s destruction. It has not escaped their notice that the ten months into Trump’s second term, the economy is still crap. As an American living abroad in a more affordable country, going to coffee shops, bars and restaurants, I was stunned by how expensive everyday life is in the US. The recent opinion polls showing that by a large margin, most Americans (not only Zoomers) are down on the Trump administration’s handling of the economy — that reflects the good judgment of the American people, I’m sorry to say. If the Republicans don’t get their act together, and fast, they’re going to be shellacked in the 2026 midterms.
I would not characterize the U.S. economy at this moment as “still crap.” I’d characterize it as a mixed bag. The unemployment rate is 4.3 percent as of August. (We didn’t get the September numbers because of the government shutdown.) That’s up a bit from the beginning of the year, but still low by historical standards. The U.S. gross domestic product growth in the second quarter was 3.8 percent — nice, robust growth. And as noted last week, the stock market is having a gangbusters year. But U.S. consumer confidence is near its record low.
A 3 percent inflation rate is higher than we want, and a factor in people’s perception of the high cost of living, but much better than most of the Biden era. But tariffs make every imported good more expensive, as well as every domestically produced good that uses foreign-made components or materials.
I concur with Dreher and others like Noah Rothman that Republicans need to refocus their energies on addressing economic issues, particularly the rising cost of living. If you want a good example of how Republicans should not handle this issue, take a look at the president’s recent interview with Laura Ingraham:
Trump: Our prices are much lower. Their line is ‘prices.’ Affordability. That’s the new word, affordability. It’s much less expensive under Trump. And I haven’t been here long. Nine months is not a long time. But look at what I have done to energy. Look at the price of gasoline. Going from $4.50 to $2.50 or $2.70. It’s going to be two dollars, gasoline.
Ingraham: People want affordable—
Trump: The economy is my thing! And we have the greatest economy in history!
Ingraham: Are Republicans not selling it?
Trump: Yes. Republicans don’t talk about it.
Ingraham: So, they need to do a better job on Capitol Hill of–
Trump: The Democrats false talk and the Republicans — and I say it all the time. Republicans have to talk about the fact that prices are down.
But they’re not; the inflation rate has declined from the worst days of the Biden administration, but the prices themselves have not declined; they have just increased at a slower pace than a few years ago.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, a declaration that no, the new stadium for the Washington Commanders football team should not be named after President Trump.