Happy Thursday folks,
Distressing news about the US economy this morning, as The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Peters and David Wessel report that “more than one in six men ages 25 to 54, prime working years, don’t have jobs.”
That adds up to more than ten million men across America who are out of work.
There are a few factors that have led to this horrific statistic, and policy decisions impact them all.
As Peters and Wessel note, “so many men are out of work is partly a symptom of a U.S. economy slow to recover from the worst recession in 75 years” and due to labor shifts caused by technology and globalization.
While the latter “trend has been building for decades,” it’s clear that the liberal policy agenda of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and House Minority Leader Pelosi has failed to help middle-class Americans (men and women alike), get ahead.
Instead of focusing on broad-based economic growth that would simultaneously help Americans out of the recession and rebuild our long-term competitiveness, the Left focused on counter-productive policies like the stimulus and Obamacare.
President Obama will likely say that his policies haven’t been given enough time or that he’s made plenty of progress (e.g. overall unemployment numbers), but the American workforce is still hurting.
For example, the payroll to population rate fell to 42 percent in January, which is “down 1.6 percentage points from the 43.6 percent found in the same month last year and in January 2012,” according to Gallup.
This means that only 42 percent of the adult population (18 and up) in the US is “employed full-time by an employer for at least 30 hours per week.” This bodes poorly for a President who hopes to continue to spend money on frivolous projects on the backs of a shrinking labor force. (Maybe we can just become more indebted to China???)
And this trend looks like it will not correct itself anytime soon because laws like Obamacare are disincentivizing people to work, as the Congressional Budget Office’s Director recently noted.
America is at a crossroads. The American people deserve better policies than what they are getting from the President’s liberal agenda.
Seize the day.