Posted on 05/14/2016 5:35:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Even though the official unemployment rate fell below 5%, most of us who live in the real world know better: there are still an estimated 30 million Americans who have either given up looking for work or are underemployed. According to the latest Pew Research, the American middle class has shrunk for the first time in decades and is no longer the economic majority. In the mean time, the number of low-income Americans is rising. Who should we blame for this economic reality? Many point their fingers at immigrants. Maybe you have heard this saying, “When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back at you.” We as a nation need to honestly examine inner factors that hold American workers back: education, culture, and welfare.
First, our education system fails to produce a sufficiently educated workforce. Today the U.S. spends on average $12,000 per pupil per year in K-12, one of the highest amounts in the world. Yet U.S. students score only “average,” according to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) report. According to a Cato Institute study, between 1970 and 2010, the total cost of a K-12 education on a per-pupil basis increased 188% after adjusting for inflation. Reading scores on the national NEAP test have increased less than 1% between 1970 and 2012. Math scores on the same exam increased 2%.
Our higher education system doesn’t fare any better. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis shows that since 2001, underemployment among recent college graduates has increased. About 45% of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” holding jobs that typically do not require a bachelor’s degree. Part of this can be attributed to the economic recession in 2008, but the long-term trend shows a mismatch between what students learn in school and the skills and knowledge businesses need. Colleges and universities need to better prepare our young people by closely linking future employment opportunities with their current fields of study. In addition, we need to have more vocational schools that can teach young people employable skills. Not everyone needs to go to college. An experienced welding technician can easy command $70,000 or higher, more than many college graduates.
We all know that a good education makes a huge difference to someone’s future happiness and prosperity. Anyone who is serious about helping American workers ought to support effective education reform to provide young people with more choices and real knowledge.
The second factor holding America back is our culture. We as a nation have experienced a cultural shift to one that doesn’t appreciate physical work. Low-paying, labor-intensive jobs such as picking fruit, slaughtering chickens, and housekeeping are not desirable to even many of the poorest Americans. In the summer of 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported a persistent farm labor shortage due to the decline of illegal immigrants. Despite farmers raising some wages more than 20% and the youth unemployment rate being 12.2% in July 2015—few Americans flock to farms. At $11.20 an hour, back-breaking work is not attractive to even the least-skilled American workers. Consequently, “a years-long decline in farmhands is reducing annual fruit and vegetable production by 9.5%, or $3.1 billion, in the U.S.”
Mike Rowe, host of the popular TV show Dirty Jobs, criticized this cultural phenomenon of looking down on physical or labor-intensive work. He said, “Dirt used to be a badge of honor. Dirt used to look like work. But we’ve scrubbed the dirt off the face of work, and consequently we’ve created this suspicion of anything that’s too dirty.” By doing so, according to Rowe, “we waged a war on work,” and the American working-age population suffers the most. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven by the Denver Rescue Mission and seen able-bodied young men congregating in front of the building in the middle of the day with nothing to do. It’s a heart-breaking scene. Research shows that only 3% of Americans who work full time, year round, are in poverty. So no weapon is more powerful to fight the war on poverty than work—any kind of work. As a nation, we need to re-emphasize the honor and dignity of work.
The third factor that holds American workers back is our welfare system. Our generous welfare benefits are disincentives to work. A study by the Cato Institute shows that “in nine states—Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland—as well as Washington, D.C., annual benefits were worth more than $35,000 a year.” Keep in mind that these welfare benefits are not taxed. So the study shows that $35,000 worth of annual benefits for a welfare recipient is equivalent to earning $60,590 in pretax income. This study concludes that,
"In fact, welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 34 states and the District of Columbia. In Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., welfare pays more than a $20-an-hour job, and in five additional states it yields more than a $15-per-hour job."
Since the 2008 economic recession, the U.S. government has made it even easier for Americans to sign up for welfare benefits. For example, eligibility rules for getting food stamps were relaxed and work requirements were waived. University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan concluded in his research that “the American stimulus reduced average incentives to be employed.” In 2013, there were 48 million Americans on food stamps, representing a 16-million increase since 2008.
Our generous welfare system and its accessibility not only have incentivized workers not to work, but also have created an unofficial minimum wage. Why? Because when anti-immigration advocates demand American businesses hire American workers only, especially for entry-level positions, they’re essentially imposing a drastic minimum wage hike—to at least $20 an hour—for American businesses, because welfare recipients have no incentive to take any job that pays less than their welfare benefits.
Had American businesses been forced to raise minimum wage to $20 an hour, the cost of doing business would have skyrocketed, which in turn would have forced businesses to choose between passing the higher cost on to consumers (which businesses have limited power to do) and reducing hiring. Most conservatives as well as many economists know that a minimum wage hike of this magnitude would end up hurting the employment of the most vulnerable American workers. It’s Economics 101: when you raise the price of something (labor), demand for it will decrease (fewer people will be hired). When one can’t find a job, a mandatory wage increase is meaningless. Some firms might have been forced out of business if they couldn’t find a financially viable way to survive the higher cost.
Education, culture, and welfare are not the only three factors holding American workers back. Other factors—including ruinous regulations, such as the occupational licensing requirements—harm employment opportunities of American workers too. These factors have nothing to do with immigration, but they contribute to our nation’s low labor participation rate and the bleak employment picture in America. No matter who is in the White House, to help American workers, we as a nation need to focus on addressing issues such as education reform, culture change, welfare reform, and getting rid of ruinous anti-work regulations.
Government should back off from all education. Government schools should fade away and be replaced by Voucher programs.
Government aid for college should cease. A lot of college graduates get lousy, low-paying jobs. College is not really a path to riches. If a well-to-do family has $200,000 in cash and wants to pay that much for a 4-year degree so that Junior can be a Communications Major and blog for a living, that’s fine. I have no problem with that.
Families that don’t have $200,000 laying around will just have to watch their children become plumbers, welders, or programmers. They will be rich and successful. Heck they can even blog for a living, if they don’t mind being as poor as the college graduate down the street.
People are happier when they have less stuff in their life. Big House? Stressful corporate job? Big tax bill? Massive college debt? Pressure to have a better vacation than your neighbor? We need to scale back and just have simpler lives.
We’ve built a very damaging culture.
I know somebody who got a fine he couldn’t pay for burning garbage illegally. (You can burn yard waste but no paper or cardboard and any plastic including a Walmart bag, is a CRIMINAL offense.) To force payment they take away your driver’s license until you pay. He lost his job and then his wife and then his house. He’s on all kinds of help now.
Incidentally, this county has two self-funded EPA’s, one for the county and one for the city. These people have a staff who spend their day writing fines to pay their own salary. In order to write enough fines to pay their salaries they have lots of regulations. Things you wouldn’t think twice about will net them $250 and a potential criminal arrest for you. But the good news is you can attend an early offender intervention program, pay the fines and $1500 for the program and the criminal part of the arrest will be erased from your record.
Unbridled immigration has made labor too plentiful and almost free.
"... but the long-term trend shows a mismatch between what students learn in school and the skills and knowledge businesses need. Colleges and universities need to better prepare our young people by closely linking future employment opportunities with their current fields of study. In addition, we need to have more vocational schools that can teach young people employable skills."
For example, we need a lot fewer Psych Majors and lot more Engineers. Psych majors have relatively high unemployment levels and we have to import a large percentage of our engineers and technical wizards. They are mostly good people but Americans could have those jobs if they were just willing to put in the effort.
I would put “welfare” in the #1 position. The disdain for manual work is a direct result of giving people more money to do nothing than they can earn through work. If the choice, instead, were to work or starve, most of them would choose work.
The college problem is slightly different. Colleges have academic counselors who should routinely discuss the potential for future employment with any given major. If they don’t discuss that, or fail to encourage students to do their own research into the marketability of various majors, they do their students a disservice.
I saw a recent internet meme which showed a cop car from the USA contrasted with a cop car from Europe.
European cop car: brightly colored. It screams “COP CAR!” If you need help, you see it, flag it down, and the cop helps you. Visibility is important for this to work.
American cop car: totally secret. Looks like any car on the road. They drive around and pounce on unsuspecting citizens who have violated one of the 10 million regulations, they extract some revenue from the citizen and then they continue on their way, looking for fresh victims.
While $20.00/hr is hyperbolic rubbish the premise is unsound here also. If Company X needs Y man-hours per wk/mo/year to provide product/service Z then Y is fixed. Either they cut man-hours and produce less product or raiae prices. If they can get the same amount of product/service with less man-hours Y-R then the company was being mismanaged. Reduction R was waste and should have been done regardless of the per hour labor cost.
Sending manufacturing abroad. Importing people to replace Americans at a lower rate. Paying higher taxes to support the new arrivals and their 4 wives who don’t work.
The biggest problem is that so much of our manufacturing has left the country. In China, those who work on Apple iPhones and the like are paid a fraction of what a US worker would get. If the products were made here, they would cost several times as much as they do now. I’m not making any value judgments here, just stating economic facts. US workers are very highly paid, relative to third world workers, and our safety and other regulatory oversight adds even more to the cost of manufacturing here. So jobs go elsewhere and unemployment here soars.
——A lot of college graduates get lousy, low-paying jobs-—
The reason is that those individuals have lousy pretty much worthless degrees. An A or B in underwater basket weaving for a fine arts major is meaningless in a work a day world that needs people that can communicate with their counterparts in Singapore or Zug.
I could not have said it any better.
“We’ve built a very damaging culture.”
It’s hard to learn anything when you’re forced to share a classroom with violent retards.
“Incidentally, this county has two self-funded EPA’s, one for the county and one for the city.”
We have people here in Boulder County, Colorado that count Prairie Dogs for a living.
I refuse to read an article that has a grammar error in the title (apostrophe).
Not true. The situation you describe is way more complex than that. When you buy an I-Phone( or any durable good for that matter ) you pay for management, advertising, materials, engineering, transportation, packaging, design, testing and labor. If you buy it at a place like Sprint you are also paying for overhead. So what you are really saying is the labor component that I pay may cost twice as much but overall, the retail price increase will marginal based on the amount labor represents of the retail price which is typicality less that 10%.
“We have people here in Boulder County, Colorado that count Prairie Dogs for a living.”
If I had a prairie dog in my yard they’d have to learn subtraction.
When I was a middle class teenager growing up in suburbia in the 1960’s I performed manual labor to earn money. I worked on a farm, mowed yards in my neighborhood, painted houses, had a newspaper route, and did odd jobs for neighbors. When I was old enough to work (age 16) I flipped hamburgers at a fast food restaurant while continuing my paper route and mowing jobs. At 18 I was able to get a job with a moving and storage company paying slightly above minimum wage.
My high school had vocational programs in woodworking, graphic arts, and printing. Students at my high school interested in learning a trade could attend vocational classes at the local community college half day. Many of my fellow students who didn’t want a 4 year college degree or couldn’t afford one learn to be auto mechanics, electricians, cabinet makers, HVAC repairmen, dental hygienists, plumbers, and machine tool operators. Others joined the military where they served 4 years and learned skills which turned into careers.
Today, there are no vocational classes at my former high school and no cooperative vocational program with the community college. The community college has dropped most of the vocational classes and is focused on liberal arts instruction for students who will transfer to a four year college.
Today illegal immigrants mow yards and work on the harvest instead of local teenagers. Today our politicians and academia are obsessed with four year liberal arts education in subjects providing no skills for earning a living.
Today we have lost respect for manual labor.
Fixed.
BTTT
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