Work-Life Balance: Why Millennials Get Hit Hardest
Even with (or maybe because of) the proliferation of apps and technology to help workers connect with their jobs round-the-clock, finding a balance between work and life is getting harder, according to a new report from Ernst & Young.
The study finds that about half of managers worldwide work more than 40 hours a week, and 40 percent say their hours have increased over the past five years. In addition to technology shifts, the “always on” work culture reflects lingering effects of the recession that has left fewer employees handling larger workloads.
The balancing act is particularly difficult for millennials, who are becoming managers just as they enter into parenthood. U.S. millennial parents are the most likely to have a spouse that’s also working at least full-time, and they’re the less likely than older generations to have taken a career break when having children.
Related: 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Work-Life Balance
More than one in four millennials is working more after having children, compared to 13 percent of Gen Xers and 16 percent of boomers. Millennial parents place a high value on flexibility, and say that a flexible schedule would make them more engaged, less likely to quit, and more likely to work flexible hours. Even so, one in six says they have suffered a negative consequence for working a flexible schedule.
More than half of those surveyed said that they would make job and career changes in order to find a better work-life balance. Those findings echo the results of a CareerBuilder survey released last year which found that a third of workers don’t want a leadership role because they don’t want to sacrifice work-life balance.
Chart of the Day: Boosting Corporate Tax Revenues
The leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have all proposed increasing taxes on corporations, including raising income tax rates to levels ranging from 25% to 35%, up from the current 21% imposed by the Republican tax cuts in 2017. With Bernie Sanders leading the way at $3.9 trillion, here’s how much revenue the higher proposed corporate taxes, along with additional proposed surtaxes and reduced tax breaks, would generate over a decade, according to calculations by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, highlighted Wednesday by Bloomberg News.
Chart of the Day: Discretionary Spending Droops
The federal government’s total non-defense discretionary spending – which covers everything from education and national parks to veterans’ medical care and low-income housing assistance – equals 3.2% of GDP in 2020, near historic lows going back to 1962, according to an analysis this week from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Chart of the Week: Trump Adds $4.7 Trillion in Debt
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated this week that President Trump has now signed legislation that will add a total of $4.7 trillion to the national debt between 2017 and 2029. Tax cuts and spending increases account for similar portions of the projected increase, though if the individual tax cuts in the 2017 Republican overhaul are extended beyond their current expiration date at the end of 2025, they would add another $1 trillion in debt through 2029.
Chart of the Day: The Long Decline in Interest Rates
Are interest rates destined to move higher, increasing the cost of private and public debt? While many experts believe that higher rates are all but inevitable, historian Paul Schmelzing argues that today’s low-interest environment is consistent with a long-term trend stretching back 600 years.
The chart “shows a clear historical downtrend, with rates falling about 1% every 60 years to near zero today,” says Bloomberg’s Aaron Brown. “Rates do tend to revert to a mean, but that mean seems to be declining.”
Chart of the Day: Drug Price Plans Compared
Lawmakers are considering three separate bills that are intended to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Here’s an overview of the proposals, from a series of charts produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. An interesting detail highlighted in another chart: 88% of voters – including 92% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans – want to give the government the power to negotiate prices with drug companies.
