Obama's Economy: Where Did All The Young Workers Go?

IBD ^ | 06/18/2014 | Stephen Moore

[SeekAndFind]

Economists are scratching their heads trying to figure out a puzzle in this recovery: Why are young people not working? People retiring at age 60 or even 55 in a weak economy is easy to understand. But at 25?

The percentage of adult Americans who are working or looking for work now stands at 62.8%, a 36-year low and down more than 3 percentage points since late 2007, according to the Labor Department's May employment report.

This is fairly well-known. What isn't so well-known is that a major reason for the decline is that fewer and fewer young people are holding jobs. This exit from the workforce by the young is counter to the conventional wisdom or the Obama administration's official line.

The White House claims the workforce is contracting because more baby boomers are retiring. There's some truth to that. About 10,000 boomers retire every day of the workweek, so that's clearly depressing the labor market. Since 2009, 7 million Americans have reached official retirement age. The problem will get worse in the years to come as nearly 80 million boomers hit age 65.

But that trend tells only part of the story.

[skeeter]

Lets all contemplate these figures while the GOP, Democrats and Chamber of Commerce finally ‘reform’ immigration.

[SC_Pete]

Also, for the first time IN AMERICAN HISTORY, more companies have died than have been created. [Brookings Institution, May 5, 2014]. America is being dismantled our leadership.

[informavoracious]

Exited the workforce? How about never even entered it in a significant way due to lack of jobs, laziness, incarceration, or permanent scholarship racking up student loans that Barry will forgive? Hard to imagine that 30-40 years ago people were getting married at 21.

[WayneS]

...and to support their adult ‘children’.

[Buckeye McFrog]

They don’t want the work that’s available because they’re spoiled and feel that entry-level work or “real” work is beneath them.

[Arrowhead1952]

They are in mommy’s basements posting at the DUmp.

[oh8eleven]

it seems that the latest batch of them have no drive, determination or desire to do the best that they can.
I see a lot of teens going through training in our local grocery stores and then they just seem to disappear.
I asked a manager and he said most quit because they're too tired to work in the morning; too tired to work after school;
too tired to work in the evening; too "busy" to work on weekends; and too tired to do the job right even when they do make it in.
Bottom line - they just want things handed to them.

[P-Marlowe]

Illegal aliens not only compete for minimum wage jobs, but they are filling up all the positions for all fields of manual labor such as construction, auto repair, landscaping, plumbing, carpentry, machine operating, metal work....

Most of my friends from high school who didn't go to college went directly into these fields and did well. Now the fields are filled with low wage but experienced illegal aliens who have driven the base wages for these professions down so low that it is pretty much impossible for young people to make a career out of these jobs.

And what is amazing is that the Unions support bringing in these illegal aliens. It proves that their goal is not better working conditions for their workers, but power and money through numbers.

[12th_Monkey]

I seen a boy of about 14 or 15 the other day working at chick fil a and thought wow, did he beat the odds or what?

So sad, hardly any opportunity for today’s youth to learn the value of work, but that’s what the state wants, dependency.

[sickoflibs]

Raise the minimum wage to ~ $50 per hour?

Is this why businesses keep crying for more immigrants?

[Gaffer]

Well...you gotta admit that there are a hell of a lot of them that are partaking of government subsidized learning.

Millions in student loans they are now hearing they’ll likely not have to pay back. Millions in educational profession learning for which they will never hold a paying job. Millions in subsidized leisure that can continue (yes, from their parents’ basements) for years and years to come.

[Gaffer]

Typical business attitude thinking cheap illegal labor will go on forever, even if they are legalized. Far from it.

[kabar]

Legal immigrants are also vying for the same minimum wage jobs. 20% of legal immigrants lack even a high school diploma and another 24% have only completed high school. They are competing with the 40 percent of the native born who have a high school degree or less.

In the fourth quarter of 2013, the standard unemployment rate (referred to as U-3) for native-born adults who have not completed high school was 16.6 percent, while for those with only a high school education it was 8.5. The U-3 unemployed are people who have looked for a job in the last four weeks.

The broader U-6 measure of unemployment — which includes those want to work, but have not looked recently, and those forced to work part-time — was 28.7 percent for native-born adults who have not completed high school and 16.5 percent for those with only a high school education.

The total number of native-born, working-age adults (18 to 65) of any education level not working (unemployed or out the labor force) was 50.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2012 — 8.8 million more than in the fourth quarter of 2007, and 14.7 million more than in the same quarter of 2000.

[When do we get liberated?]

Lucky bastards. And to think I have to go to work..

[PATRIOT1876]

There's no mystery why this is happening. It's all going according to plan.

Not enough jobs in an enviro-nazi, Socialist, anti-Capitalist Obamaconomy. Now you can only survive with help from the government. Better not bite the hand that feeds you.

[zek157]

Do you think this has anything to do with the situation?

Betty Sutton on Tuesday, October 25th, 2011 in a speech in the House of Representatives

“The data shows there were 398,887 private manufacturing establishments of all sizes in the United States during the first quarter of 2001. By the end of 2010, the number declined to 342,647, a loss of 56,190 facilities. Over 10 years, that works out to an average yearly loss of 5,619 factories. Dividing that by the 365 days in a year produces a 15.39 average daily number of factories lost.”

http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2011/nov/07/betty-sutton/betty-sutton-says-average-15-us-factories-close-ea/

I’d post this graph of the US labor participation rate, but I don’t know how. It suggest the jobs are not there. I read a headline last week that we had recovered all the lost jobs from the 2008 recession. that may be true, but we need +150K jobs each month on average for new workers entering the workforce. If true that’s 1.8M annually, or 12.6M jobs that are not there.

http://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229102

Here’s a staggering statistic. In this great nation 1/2 of the jobs pay less than $27.5K. Not bad if you have 3 or 4...
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/half-the-country-makes-less-than-27520-a-year-and-15-other-signs-the-middle-class-is-dying

Anyone think this generation is going to take care of us in our golden years of retirement?

[tbw2]

Or their parents got them diagnosed with learning disabilities / ADHD / autism when in school to collect Social Security Disability checks, and then upon graduation they moved straight to SSDI.

[kabar]

There are about 23 million immigrants in the labor force with about 8 million being illegal aliens. You keep mentioning illegal aliens as the cause and miss the elephant in the room—legal permanent immigrants. And add on top of that the 2 million guest workers at any one time who are in the workforce. The scarce jobs are going to immigrants, legal and illegal.

[MCF]

“Their mother's basement”
“I would suggest they are working in the underground economy”
I believe both of these are correct.
There are also the “Trustafarians” They hang out at coffee shops, microbreweries, and street side cafes. They sometime have a part time job at a second hand resale shop, more for show and as a topic of conversation then money. They're the children and grandchildren of the well to do. Then there are the those that came from welfare homes were work and jobs were seldom seen going back a couple of generations. And, the expectation of work was not part of their growing up. They're everywhere always matter-a-factly asking for money, often shocked when told no.

[kabar]

If they are legalized, more illegal labor will come in to take their place. Real wages have been declining for over 40 years. If we had a shortage of labor, wages would be going up, not down.