Why Telling Millennials to Cancel Hulu Isn’t the Answer

Corporate media loves a nice tidy story. And when it comes to Millennials’ chronic economic stagnation, they’ve found one that’s evergreen: “If only those kombucha-addled thirtysomethings would cancel Hulu and stop ordering DoorDash, they’d all be rich by now!”

It’s the same morality play every time …

Act I: The MSM trumpets a headline about Millennials being the first generation to earn less than their parents at the same age

Act II: A finger-wagging personal finance expert explains that the real problem is Starbucks

Act III: Some establishment rag runs a puff piece about some guy who paid off his mortgage with extreme couponing.

The implication is clear: If you’re broke, it’s because you’re irresponsible; not because the system is broken. Or because the rug has been pulled out from under you. No, it’s because you eat out too much.

This isn’t just lazy analysis. It’s gaslighting.

To clear the air up front, this post isn’t throwing shade at those who did scrimp and save while pulling extra shifts to slay the debt dragon. More power to you.

That said, the situation has degraded significantly since you entered the workforce.

Let’s compare a couple of hard metrics.

Median home price, 1980: about 3x the median annual wage.

Median home price, 2025: over 8x the median annual wage.

That’s not avocado toast inflation—that’s structural economic decay.

It’s true that Millennials are less likely than their elders to own homes. But it's not because they don't want to; it's because home prices relative to income have risen dramatically since the 80s and 90s.

And if mortgages put Millennials in a no-win situation, here comes student debt saying, “Hold my beer!”

Forty years ago, most state schools charged a few hundred bucks per semester. Today, tuition has grown at five times the rate of inflation, saddling Millennials with balances they can’t realistically repay.

“Nobody put a gun to those kids’ heads and forced them to borrow for school!” OK, let‘s look at one expense no one can avoid: healthcare.

In the 1970s, the average American family spent about 5 percent of their income on health costs. Today, it’s over 17 percent, and the trend line is still pointed straight up.

Against that backdrop, wages have stagnated for decades. Productivity has skyrocketed, but workers’ share of the pie hasn’t grown with it. In fact, most of the gains have been siphoned upward to the low-work/high-pay types who publish “Skip the latte” thinkpieces.

Contrary to Boomer memes, Millennials are not only the most productive generation in history, they're one of the lowest-compensated for the value they add. They also save more of their income than previous generations.

Even if a Millennial couple cut every streaming service, brewed all their coffee at home, cooked every meal from scratch, and never set foot in a movie theater again, they might save a few thousand dollars a year.

Granted, that’s not nothing. But when the entry-level buy in for a starter home in many markets now exceeds $400,000, and when monthly insurance premiums rival a mortgage payment, “Just budget better” isn’t advice; it’s an insult.

Here’s how the sleight-of-hand works: Shift the blame from systemic collapse to individual choices. The narrative survives because it serves those who profit from the status quo. If Millennials believe their failures are purely personal, they’ll never organize to demand structural change.

But if Dave Ramsey courses aren’t the whole answer, what would it take to fix the problem?

No amount of asceticism will overcome decades of deliberate policy decisions that gutted the middle class.

Real solutions require:

1. Housing reform: Ending speculative hoarding of residential real estate, breaking the chokehold of corporate landlords, and making zoning laws work for people rather than entrenched interests

2. Student debt relief: Not token forgiveness, but a systemic rollback of the higher ed usury racket. We’re talking decoupling employment from credentialism and ending federally backed tuition inflation

3. Healthcare overhaul: Breaking the cartel pricing system, restoring competition, and removing the insurance middleman from basic care

4. Wage correction: Re-linking productivity gains to worker compensation instead of funneling them into executive bonuses and stock buybacks.

These are politically heavy lifts because they require dismantling entrenched profit streams. But without them, Millennials will continue to tread water, told they’d be fine if they just canceled Hulu.

The spendthrift Millennial canard persists because it’s comforting to those who don’t want to admit thes scope and scale of the crisis. But comforting lies can’t pay the rent—or the $700,000 lifetime tab for healthcare.

You can’t budget your way out of a broken economy.

Whether the people in charge have the political will to fix it remains to be seen.

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.

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