Are 20 Million Americans Just Lazy?

This clip gives a short, concise, but well informed look at youth unemployment around the world. 

When your college offers a "paper or plastic?" seminar, you know the job market is looking bad.

OK, it's not quite that bad yet, but it's getting close.  The over-educated, over-qualified low wage employee has become an archetype in our society.  We've all seen them.  The barrista with a master's degree.  The senior citizen wiping tables at McDonald's after a 40 year career of skilled labor.  The grad student stocking grocery shelves.  For a year or so I've heard people throw out an estimate that there are 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S..  About a month ago, I actually looked up the best recent numbers I could find.  I came up with a number of at least 20.3 million un and under-employed people in the U.S., and that's a minimum number.  Nobody knows the real number.

So what's going on?  Are 20 million Americans just lazy?  The clip above talks about young people unemployment.  Man, I got EVERY job I ever applied for from age 17 to 28.  I was completely unqualified for most of them.  Hell, I managed a small amusement park at age 18.  Really.  That was starting in the 80's, in a city, Boise, Idaho, that actually had a pretty tight labor market for that time.  What has happened since then that got us in this mess now?  Here are some of the major factors:

Outsourcing- Millions of manufacturing, and some service jobs (like call centers for example) have been moved to other, much cheaper, countries, Mexico and China in particular.  This is the big culprit for the loss of good paying jobs in most people's minds, but it's far form the only one.

Taken by technology- This is the thing that most people gloss over.  Millions of jobs have also been lost or taken over by various forms of technology.  When I was a kid, and my parents drove into a gas station, a grown man would come out, pump the gas, and wash the windows and check the oil while we waited.  Those thousands of jobs were replaced by self-service gas pumps.  I read once that ATM machines now do the work that 800,000 bank tellers used to do.  I don't know if that number is accurate, but it gives us a sense of how those jobs were lost.  

Concentration of wealth- In the 1980's, the now legendary president Ronald Reagan helped push through tax cuts to wealthy Americans and corporations.  The idea was called "trickle down economics," or "Reaganomics" for short.  The idea was that by giving rich people and corporations tax breaks and loopholes, they would build or grow huge businesses that would employ lots of people.  A quick look around will show you that not a whole actually lot trickled down.  What did happen was that many wealthy people became super rich, and now control an incredible share of our nation's wealth.  That small number of people can't possibly spend as much as tens of millions of average Americans could.  In an really simple analogy, much of the U.S. wealth is in huge resevoirs owned by super rich people, but the rivers feeding everyone else have nearly dried up.  Money flows like water in a healthy economy.

Trillions of dollars held offshore- I've heard estimates that 1 to 3 TRILLION dollars are being held in other countries to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes.  Even with all the loopholes in the tax laws, many major corporations are holding tens of millions of dollars or more in other countries.  No one has figured out a way to get this money back into the U.S..  Keep in mind, a trillion is a thousand billion.  

The Big Transition- This is my name for the period of society we're in right now.  We've left the Industrial Age, where factories in nearly every town and city employed most people.  We're heading towards a new age, called The Information Age, The Digital Age, The Creative Age and similar names, depending who you listen to.  But we're not in that new age yet.  We're in a decades long transition between the two ages, where one revolution after another in technology, communication, and business is surging through society.  Right now there are high paying jobs requiring tech skills and creativity.  Then there are a much larger number of low skill service jobs.  The huge number of good paying mid skilled jobs have disappeared.  The more I look into future trends by the people who study those things, the worse the future job situation looks.

So... again... are 20 million Americans just lazy?  Some are, of course.  But there a many, huge macro forces depleting the job market right now.  Millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide, are caught in really crazy circumstances.

So who's going to create the millions of jobs we need?  Senator Bernie Sanders, in his presidential bid, pushed the issue of putting millions of Americans to work repairing and building infrastructure, like roads and bridges, in the U.S.  This would be great... if the politicians could work together and make it happen.  I'm not holding my breath on that one.  

Professor Richard Florida, economic development specialist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, says we need to make service jobs higher paying and better jobs.  That would help, too.  But, again, I'm not holding my breath. 

So... who's left to create millions of jobs?  We are.  You and me.  I keep coming back to the same conclusion.  Millions of Americans (and people in other countries) are going to have to create our own jobs.  We just can't wait for other people to do it.  So, no... you're not necessarily lazy because you  don't have a great job.  But you might be fighting a losing battle in a job market with millions of similarly skilled people.  This blog is about finding our best options.