Every time I hear some smug pundit or politician saying that we can’t spend to create jobs because that would be laying too much of a burden on our children, I get angry — because of reports like this:

For this generation of young people, the future looks bleak. Only one in six is working full time. Three out of five live with their parents or other relatives. A large majority — 73 percent — think they need more education to find a successful career, but only half of those say they will definitely enroll in the next few years. No, they are not the idle youth of Greece or Spain or Egypt. They are the youth of America, the world’s richest country, who do not have college degrees and aren’t getting them anytime soon.

Everything we know says that this generation will never — never — recover from the terrible job market into which it has graduated. But hey, we can’t do anything about that; we must have austerity, for the sake of the next generation.