Nearly 102 Million Americans Do Not Have A Job Right Now – Worse Than At Any Point During The Last Recession The argument is essentially that everyone should be working. It is a stupid argument made by stupid and myopic people who know nothing about what each of these individuals needs or wants but who are willing to tell them what they want is dead wrong. I can clear up this nonsense using one chart from the article. I was frankly surprised to find this chart spanning 1945 to 2019. Usually, these doom and gloom-ers are smart enough to cherry pick the chart by truncating the years most commonly from 1990 to present. This chart is an important chart, and it holds some interesting information which we can use to decipher what Americans want, and it is not for everyone to work full-time.
Notice that from 1945 to 1970 the chart shows a settled position where only about 59% of Americans were in the workforce. This was a tip of the hat to the fact that most women once they decided to have a family stopped working to raise the children. So, some young women were in the workforce and some middle age women would later in life return to the workforce, but during the prime of life, women spent time on the most important task for humans, raising the next generation. In essence, men were left to do the less important jobs. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating two separate trends occurred. One was women the other was coloreds, and both were encouraged to enter the workforce. The result was an immediate and rapid increase in the workforce expanding the "in the workforce" portion of the population from 60% in 1970 to 66-67% from 1990 to 2000. But Americans did not want everyone to work full time, and after 2000 they began to drop out of the workforce in ever greater numbers. Some to care for and raise children, others to care for and assist elderly parents and relatives, some to do both. I have no idea what the correct workforce participation rate is, but it is not 67%. Americans have voted with our feet, that his too high. Is the current 63% the correct number? Who knows? I would suggest we might see a return to the 59% of the 1950s or we might see the workforce participation rate plateau at 63%. What is silly is the argument that we need to return to the 67% numbers after Americans have so strongly voted with our feet and when unemployment is below 4% if people wanted to go back to work they could without any trouble. Instead, I would suggest that the post 9/11 recession started something. It allowed many people to realize that they could make ends meet on a single salary provided the other spouse did all the housework, child rearing, and food preparation as was done in families in the 1950s. The 2008 recession doubled down on this by dragging on so long that it forced some to alter their lifestyles. It seems that many liked this more relaxed less pressured lifestyle where one spouse worked, and the other tended the home, raised the children, and addressed elder care issues. "If you would like to claim that we have had a very marginal “employment recovery” since the last recession, that is a legitimate argument to make. But anything beyond that is simply not being honest." I just made an argument which explains what is happening and fits the graph well. The author's arguments do not. He needs to keep plumping his economic collapse fearmongering which is not supported by the data or by personal experience. This is the argument, "Who'ya gonna believe me or your lying eyes?" My lying eyes if you are asking, and the data like the fact that the first quarter GDP showed a 3.2% increase even after the long government shutdown which was supposed to result in about 1.5% GDP growth, the fact that unemployment remains extremely low at about 4%, and wages are rising. People like this scour the statistics for any which can be spun to look bad. They publish these lists because bad news sells. The also predict recessions every year, knowing that recessions happen routinely, and when they do, they take credit for their "prescience." In reality, they just get lucky once a decade or so and expect you to forget the fact that they are wrong the other 9 years. Don't be surprised if the workforce participation rate falls further. It is doing so because we are a wealthy nation becoming wealthier, and we are beginning to realize the value that we knew in the 1950s but forgot by 1970. The Boomers are the crux of this stupidity. We are an exceptionally foolish, self-deluded, and self-inflated generation. To be fair, we are the worst generation in human history. In the future, when one looks up Boomer Generation online, there will be a photo of the petty grifter-in-chief and wife, Bill and Hillary Clinton. They are the most accurate representatives of our generation of spendthrifts, and wastrels.
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