Posted on 06/18/2014 5:18:01 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Parents who allow their young adult to live in their house and provide them financial support are doing them no favors. Instead, they are contributing to the “gibmedat” culture. When they are elderly and they tell their “child” “no more”, they will probably be ax-murdered.
Let me think...
That chart is a good depiction of what is/isn’t happening with job creation. It flys in the face of many of the smug posters here talking referencing lazy kids living in mom’s basement.
Although if the illegals are unionized and their wages lifted to that level, they won't be such a bargain to employ anymore. That might help.
All of the shale fracking companies in this area are desperate for additional field help. Pay is rather good. And they will train.
Problem is too few young men are willing to take them up on the offer because it’s REAL WORK. Physical labor, outdoors in the rain and the cold.
Kids seem to think they should get a degree and then have a divine right to some overpaid desk job where they sit there and put out tweets all day.
And then there are about a million young African-American men in prison, or so I hear.
Of the 472 civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 46 percent of workers even in these occupations.
They also ignore the fact that immigrants, legal and illegal, use welfare programs to a greater extent than the native-born.
Oh, that doesn't even make them happy. You should hear them over at reddit complaining about being a "wage-slave trapped in a cubicle" when they really SHOULD be on a sailboat in the Med somewhere, or climbing mountains.
“Economists are scratching their heads trying to figure out a puzzle in this recovery:” - sounds like some more economists need to be unemployed as well.
“Economists are scratching their heads trying to figure out a puzzle in this recovery: Why are young people not working?’
Here are two possibilities:
1) Multigeneration welfare dependency. By the time a welfare dependent household is in the third or fourth generation of single mother, high school dropout, having multiple children by different men who are not present in the lives of the female or the children, the members of the household no longer value education or hard work. Taking the path of least resistance and staying locked into the benefits of the entitlement plantation is the only path they understand. It becomes part of the culture of the underclass and results in multiple life decisions (not doing homework, not learning skills, not picking up trash in the yard, not being respectful, not learning to communicate effectively) that result in an adult who is not employable.
2) The destruction of small business by government. Small businesses have historically been the job creation engine for the US economy. In the current state of crony capitalism in which large businesses benefit from close relationships with big government and small business is crushed by government regulation, government imposed costs (ACA for example), and unrestrained tort attorneys, small business formation is dropping resulting in fewer jobs being created for young people. In addition, young people with an entrepreneurial concept find it much more difficult to raise capital and form a business.
I don't know where you got your statistics on the illegals, but from that I've seen in the past, there are he lot more than 8M of them, more like 30M.
The scarce jobs are going to immigrants, legal and illegal.
Agree with that completely. I'm seeing the tech industry being overrun by 'legal' foreigners.
‘yeah these days the word retired has a new meaning of would work if I could find a job but no one wants me’
I disagree. I was totally retired for 2 and a half years and decided to go back to work. Took 2 months or so to get a job because I refused to give my personal info to some kid with tats and wires thru their face. When I finally managed to get around the gatekeepers, I had no problem getting a job. I have turned down 3 since then.
The company I work for did not want young workers, mainly because there is no such thing. They have no work ethic, do not show up or show up on time, they look for ways to hide from work, and gripe about the pay of the job they accepted.
If you are not drooling and are in half way decent shape at age 60-70 you can find a job. These kids were raised by lazy, incompetent, and stupid parents who did not prepare their children for life. Good luck to the last 2 generations cause that is what they will have to depend on.
The 8 million pertains to those in the workforce. The numbers come from the Census Bureau and think tanks like the conservative Center for Immigration Studies and the more liberal Pew Hispanic Center. I think there may be more than 8 million in the workforce but four times that number just doesn't compute. We know that there are about 15 million legal immigrants in the workforce.
I don't think that's the assumption.
There assumption is that we need an endless flow of new immigrant workers who may or may not start out being legal,
because as time goes on the ones who have been here for a while (and certainly their kids) will become Americanized and realize they can make just as much $$$ off taxpayers by faking disability and watching TV all day, than working a manual job in unpleasant conditions.
bump
I couldn’t agree more. Immigration is the defining issue of our time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.