Nine Million American Men Pushed Out of Workforce by Cheap-Labor Policies

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2017-12-20 05:56

Article here. Excerpt:

'The U.S. has experienced a record 86 consecutive months of job growth. But some nine million men of prime age—that is, between 25 and 54—still are not working. Most have given up looking for jobs. Helping these men get back into the workforce should be a leading public-policy priority …

The largest issue facing American men is not that they are rewarded for remaining in a recliner, but that they cannot find rewarding work. The bulk of the decline in employment has been for men with a high-school diploma or less, who have seen their employment rates fall from 97% in 1964 to 83% today. This has coincided with a decline in their relative wages: High-school grads in the 1970s earned two-thirds what their college-educated counterparts took home. Today it’s around half.

Reversing the withdrawal of men from the workforce will require rising wages. This can be achieved by improving the skills of workers through education and training and improving the bargaining power of workers to raise wages. Direct steps like expanding the earned-income tax credit could also make a difference, though the policy is absent from the current tax-reform bill—despite Speaker Paul Ryan’s past support for it.
...
The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a large percentage of the nation’s annual income has shifted to investors and away from employees.'

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Comments

I.e., the stock market. Great if you're in it. But what if you aren't because you don't have the $$ to be in it (b/c you don't have a job)?

Money in the SM is a simple pyramid scheme, of sorts. You buy and hope others will buy also, thereby increasing demand for shares, leading to a rise in demand-based value.

Open secret: shares of a security aren't actually worth anything to a company after the share is sold by the company. Once sold, money goes into the company and then the share is traded, its price rising/falling, based entirely upon its *perceived* value. A share that actually yields dividends that eventually add up to the price paid for the share any time before Hell freezes over is now a rare thing. Time was, dividends were the whole reason to own a share in some company. Now they only figure marginally in the value of the stock issue.

Point is, all that $$ in the SM is doing NOTHING for the economy as such. It's akin to the kind of money that was characterized in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" when he talked of money collected as rent. Rent money, he said, did nothing but transfer $ from one party to another. Real estate that was merely occupied but not put to productive use was simply a thing. Human beings did nothing productive by occupying land. Only when the land was used productively was real value derived from it in the form of food, timber, etc.

Money sent into the SM is not much different. It is simply a game of "there's a bigger fool than I out there, and more of them," being played.

Money paid to people who are actually DOING something useful and productive is the kind of investment Adam Smith would have been happy about. Money spent to buy something that does nothing... like stock issues... would have been Mr. Smith's idea of money not well-spent.

For decades we've been rewarding money not well-spent in terms of productivity and penalizing money well-spent in terms of productivity. The result? Millions on welfare sucking up money unearned, a direct transfer of wealth without productive ROI, just like rents.

Want to Make America Great Again? Stop rewarding non-productive investments and start rewarding productive ones.

Even a dunce like myself can see that.

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2017-12-20 06:48

Put that into perspective... the US has a pop'n of 323 million. According to this site:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

the US has 205 million people of working age in it. Let's just say 1/2 are men so that is 102.5 million. Lop off 2.5 million to cover men not counted in the labor force for any number of reasons (in jail, etc.) and you get an even 100 million. 9 mill. / 100 mill. = 9% of work-aged men in the US are NOT WORKING because of cheap labor policies and bad investment incentive policies.

If it weren't for welfare, I do wonder what public order would look like as an issue right now?

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2017-12-20 06:58