I have no idea what to say for the Gen Y, who will have to tighten the belt to the point that it cuts them in half....
Well, the military part of the industrial complex is in full swing at least.... Or at least it was last I checked.
Actually, yeah, going into the Navy for American kids right out of high school wouldn't be a terrible idea in this god forsaken mess we're in. Navy doesn't have the "boots on the ground" casualty approach the Army does, and certainly not what the crazy Marines do. You will be stuck in a crappy low job for the duration which would be repetitive and often intentionally pointless. However, say this with me now: VA benefits.... Yeah.
Keep in mind, the recruitment posters are a total lie. It sucks; you will hate the hell out of it. You will either be on some ship or some port, who the hell knows where. Your chances of being stateside are slim.
The thing about being in the USAF, is that you have tons of downtime waiting for shit to hit the fan. There's a ton of waiting, even after the menial stuff you have to do. Read ... read like hell. That's about the best advice I've got and I know it sucks.
Other than that: a few things about budget (translation, we live worse than our parents did):
Never ever buy a new car. It loses value faster than an ice cream sandwich in the arctic. Even a car that is 2 or 3 years old, if checked out by a good mechanic is loads cheaper. Same goes for most longer term durable goods actually (tech being the exception). Tragically, this means we're scavenging off stuff other people got new....
How messed up is it that the last generation had sports cars built for everybody, as the Ford Mustang was originally designed to be affordable on a secretary's salary and specifically marketed to women....Same goes with food and clothing being off-brand.... Entertainment is also kind of necessarily done on the cheap, which is giving rise to a surprising comeback in board game culture, of all things.
I also disagree that outsourcing isn't a problem:
China is building basically a new country and will overtake us in a few years economically. Yeah, really. We're letting our country fall to pieces around us. It is not a coincidence that China is where the industrial production/labor jobs are moving....
Automation is going to become a problem, because we're either going to go all Star Trek utopia with this, or we're going for the opposite which is a dis-utopia. SalmonGod kinda touched upon this a bit already.
That said, we've got like 30 million people in the US who need to be put to work and paid to be doing ... something. The irony is, we could totally find something for them to do.
Hell public works projects, though expensive as hell, could revamp our dying infrastructure. That article is from 2008, and yeah we've known about this problem for decades but have done exactly nothing about it. This despite the fact that, due to there being a ton of
combined sewers in the US, we are often literally drinking our own waste whenever it rains a few inches (and that's one of many reasons why bottled water is a billion dollar industry). We don't have robots to fix any of these problems and I imagine developing, building, and paying for those robots woud be more expensive than paying workers....
Frankly, we've become a nation of cheapskates to the point where we're disgusted by human waste from the town upriver being dumped into our public drinking water intake, but not enough to actually do a damn thing about it, and certainly not enough to pay to fix it.... Yes, taxes are misspent, the solution is to hire people to fix the misspending. No, it shouldn't require that, but it does, because ... reality.... My parents shouldn't have to hire the kids next door to take the dog out 5 times a day, because he's been housebroken, doesn't have a medical problem, isn't that old, and has no reason not to wait, but if they don't then he'll crap on the floor.... Then again, I'm talking to the nation that will hire security guards for commercial stores, but won't hire the equivalent of security guards for the public treasury, even though the treasury is far more likely to be stolen from and far more lucrative to steal from than the store....
TL;DR: First of all, read, please. Second, as long as enough people are still comfy, nothing will change. That comfort can't hold up forever, and when it breaks, no idea what's gonna happen or how to fix it.