July 27, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:10
3761 Untruths About Unemployment | The Daily Argument
While the Trump administration and conservative media talk about decreasing unemployment and the addition of new jobs - it's important to remember that there is another less optimistic side to the story. While the official unemployment rate is very low - many healthy working age people have simply left the workforce and quit looking for jobs. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Welcome to your daily argument.
Today we're going to be talking about unemployment, specifically American unemployment.
There are some facts that, I mean, if you're enmeshed in this quicksand of not in the workforce, you're probably aware of, but if you're not, you really, really need to, particularly if you have the blessing of the highly redundant, expensive, and time-consuming IQ test substitute known as college education.
So, I think it's really, really important to understand that in America, the number of working-age Americans without jobs is actually a lot higher now, far higher now than it was during the worst days of the 2008-plus recession.
So in January 2009, we had 92.6 million working-age Americans without a job.
In May 2017, went from 92.6 million to just under 102 million.
And although the unemployment rate is relatively low at the moment in the official capacity, it's important to remember that there's this big giant canyon of not in the workforce, wherein people who are unemployed but have given up or taken other things or other ways of making money, they just get dumped in this canyon and off the unemployment lists.
So if you take those people into account, I've seen estimates from ShadowStats and other places that the unemployment rate is actually 22% or Even higher.
Some have estimated even close to 30%.
And if you look at May 2017, sure, 133,000 new part-time jobs, but minus 367,000 full-time jobs.
And this bucket of dumping the unemployed into the canyon called not in the labor force is a way of jigging and rejigging these numbers to make the economy look better than it is.
So in May 2017, the government added 608,000 Americans into this category called not in the labor force.
So the number of working-age Americans without a job has risen since January 2009 by 9.21 million people.
Now this is really astonishing.
One of the drives from the left of course is to continue to import immigrants mostly from third world countries who are going to reliably vote for the left.
One of the reasons of course that is given for this need for immigration is that there aren't enough people to fill jobs.
That's for the H-1B visa program and so on.
It's all completely false. There are lots of STEM grads in America still looking for work.
But if you can push the unemployment rate down, then you create this imaginary need for immigration.
If you look at 22, 23, or even 30% unemployment in America saying, well, we need immigrants to fill jobs becomes kind of ridiculous.
So just before the last recession, about 63% of the working age population in America had a job.
Then during the recession, that number crashed To down somewhere between 58-59% for a while.
Now it's struggling back to the 60% mark.
That's still almost three full percentage points below where it was before the last recession struck.
And the numbers are truly staggering.
These two worlds of people with jobs and people without jobs.
This is from 2014.
In 20% of American families, not one person has a job.
The entire family is unemployed.
Just over the last little while, more than 7 million people between the ages of 25 and 54, this is sort of your prime earning years, have dropped out of the labor force.
If you look at male participation rates in the labor force in the post-Second World War period in America, it was like 97%.
Now, down to 88%.
And there is a smaller percentage of men working now than in 1940, which was near the end of an 11-year Great Depression.
The overall unemployment rate was above 14%.
Now, why? Well, there's a couple of reasons.
One, of course, is criminal records, right?
Since the criminal industrial prison complex got its fangs into, you know, the meaty hides of untoward Americans, we've got 12%, by some estimates, of adult American men have been convicted of a felony, which includes those who are currently imprisoned.
And, of course, employers have some reluctance to hire these ex-cons, so a lot of these men have found themselves in the giant bucket called pretty much Unemployable and it's a big problem particularly of course for for blacks who are well they have they commit a lot of crimes they end up with a lot of records so that's a huge problem and of course the legal system in America if you hire an ex-felon who then violent workplace or something destructive in the workplace you can be sued for that as well so this is also like 20 million Americans have felony convictions on their criminal records and Some measures say that as much as a third of all black men have felony convictions.
So that's one thing. The other thing, you know, when we think of the welfare state, we think of income transfer payments from the state.
We think of old age pensions, welfare, food stamps, and so on.
But these all pale in proportion to disability.
So about 57% of men outside the workforce, this is back from 2013, received some form of disability benefits.
And this is really astonishing.
The number of Americans receiving disability from 1996 to 2013 doubled to 8.8 million people.
That's $260 billion per year.
The US spends more on disability insurance or payments now than food stamps and welfare combined.
Now nearly half of the men on this disability are taking a painkiller every day.
And this may contribute to the opioid epidemic that's killing many, many Americans every single day.
I don't know. Couldn't find the data on how many of these men are on SSRIs or circotropics or other things which according to some researchers have pretty damaging aspects.
Now 85% of these men outside the workforce don't have a bachelor degree and the reason why post-secondary education has exploded is because of government funding and the one desire for leftists to basically trick young people into paying for their own propagandizing into Marxist doctrines but also because in the 1970s it became legally questionable to use a simple IQ test To hire people.
IQ tests are one of the most reliable ways of knowing who's going to succeed in the workforce or not, but it became illegal because it was, of course, considered to be discriminatory against Blacks, in particular Hispanics and so on, because they score lower on IQ tests as a whole.
So, the men who don't want to go to university, who want to sit out for university, or who don't like the leftist indoctrination that goes on in a lot of American universities, they're kind of dumped out, and then they end up, of course, voting for Trump.
A lot of the job growth has occurred in what are called the pink-collar jobs.
Nursing, waitressing, teaching, and so on.
And that's been a big problem as well.
A lot of jobs have been artificially, job numbers are artificially stimulated.
Look at Obamacare. Only kicks in if you work more than 30 hours a week, which of course a lot of companies to, you know, do a two for three kind of job split so that people don't hit that 30 hour mark.
Doesn't mean that they have any more money or anything like that.
So what are the young men without college degrees?
What are they doing? Well, according to researchers, 75% of the time that they would have spent working are now spent on the computer.
They're mostly playing games. And I might add, studying philosophy.
Very, very important.
Now, although they don't have jobs and this argument is, well, that's got to make them depressed and so on.
Facts are that young men in college who aren't in college, they report being happier than they were in the 2000s.
So how is this economy doing?
It's doing terribly. Only 53% of Americans are employed full-time or voluntarily part-time.
That is catastrophic.
We see, of course, with the welfare state, the rise of single motherhood, and the genetic spread of what is called employment-resistant personalities.
These are people with short fuses and little capacity to defer gratification, to wake up on time, to avoid substance abuse, and so on.
That has genetically spread throughout the American landscape, as it's across the West as a whole.
You have a lot of people, of course, coming in from third world countries who have little job skills, language skills, and so on.
It's really, really important to understand that this is sort of the dilemma or the challenge that Trump is facing in America.
You have significant numbers of Americans who have been so long without a job or who have been in families where for three generations not one person has had a job.
Think of all the human capital that has dissipated, how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to negotiate.
With managers, how to negotiate for raises, how to deal with difficult customers.
You used to get advice from that from your working parents and so on.
That's all gone. And this is the challenge that is being faced.
And the idea of piling more and more low-skilled immigrants into this highly volatile situation is nothing short of madness.
So I'm curious, you know, if you're part of these statistics or know someone who is, let me know in the comments below.
What is your life like?
Does this accurately describe your situation?
And please, please help People to understand this crippling loss of productivity and meaning for a lot of particularly young men, although women in the workforce, their participation has been declining as well.
