It’s hard to know for sure how many young people under 30 are economically depressed — whether unemployed, under-employed, or otherwise financially insolvent. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the worst summer for youth employment since the bureau began data collection in 1948; only 48.8 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were working in July 2011.

There are other factors at play here the Bureau doesn’t even look at — mountains of student debt, rising food and rent costs, underemployment — and what of the 25-to-30 crowd?  It’s a much, much bigger problem than the government is reporting. Similar conditions were theorized to be a catalyst for the summer riots in London (where even by government numbers, youth unemployment was reported to be at 20 percent). Poor economic conditions also inspired youth-fueled revolution in Egypt.  It’s bad around the globe.

One CNN Money piece from November 2010 asserts that as many as 85% of college graduates are moving back home with mom and dad. I can’t evaluate the validity of that figure, but it doesn’t seem unreasonably high. I know only a few people from my high school class that are “making it”– and by making it, I mean achieving complete financial autonomy.  Most of us are still calling home for “bailouts.”

For the most part, I sympathize with the Occupy movements sprouting up around the country — not their aims, but their grievances. The Occupiers are correctly identifying the symptoms, but the majority of young people out there are too uneducated about economics to correctly diagnose the actual problem — corporatism, not capitalism.

The GOP is missing a golden opportunity to champion a cause that will only become louder as we go deeper into the 2012 election cycle.  Barack Obama captured 66% of the youth vote in the 2008 Presidential campaign, and a cult of personality seemed to blanket college campuses. Young people were Obama’s ace in the hole. They did all of his pop-culture marketing.  They were the fresh, young faces going door-to-door, or posing for the camera in the backdrops. Politics is marketing, and youth sells. John McCain had old folks.

Obama hasn’t saved any young people from the bloody conflicts of George W. Bush — he’s expanded them. He campaigned against corporate greed, and then bailed out Wall Street. All the while, Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have continued to debase the dollar, with no repercussion from Washington. Obama’s youth flank is exposed.

Few Republican candidates seem to really talk about these issues in a way young people are going to connect with. Ron Paul might be the exception, condemning the wars we want no part in, and the policies keeping us indebted. “Young people are not raw material,” he says, “to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the plaything of government.” Not surprisingly, young people flock to him.

Now consider a recent statement of Herman Cain’s to the Wall Street Journal on the Occupy movement: “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! […] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.” Statements like Cain’s aren’t winning the GOP more young voters.

What have you witnessed of the economic situation for the Millennials?