Wealth top priority for today's youth

Wire Services CHICAGO (AP) - Melissa Greenwood sees it every day at her high school - the hyper-focus on designer labels, the must-have trendy cell phones, the classmates driving SUVs. You could say it's just teens being teens. But new polls show that the obsession with material things is growing - and that being rich is more important to today's young people than in the past. UCLA's annual survey of college freshman, released last Friday, found that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed in 2006 thought it was essential or very important to be "very well-off financially." That compares with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966, the first year the survey was done. Another recent poll from the Pew Research Center fo