These policy decisions eventually have wide-reaching consequences. But I wrote that in the heart of a recession, when it was possible to argue that the problem with the growing gap between poor youth and rich old was simply timing: The young entered the marketplace at the worst possible moment and thus were hapless victims of the cycles of the economy—it sucked, but nobody was to blame. Unfortunately, new research from St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability and the Pew Research Center extinguishes that last glimmer of counter-argument.