Jobs

Each day some new expert says the economy is almost at full employment but that is misleading. Something is rotten in the U.S. economy. Poor men without a college degree are disappearing from the labor force. The share of prime-age men (ages 25-54) who are neither working nor looking for work has doubled since the 1970s. Today, one in six prime-age men in America are either unemployed or out of the workforce altogether—about 10 million men. If the US could increase the number of manufacturing jobs these men might decide to come back to work. Farming is another area that could help if those picking crops were paid $25 an hour many of these men would go to work. A consumer who pays $2 for a pound of strawberries is paying 86 cents to the farmer who is then paying 34 cents to the pickers. If picker cost was doubled to 68 cents the consumer would pay $2.34 for a pound of strawberries. Other food product would follow that formula. Another area for these out of workers is infrastructure. As companies bring back money from overseas the government will have a large tax windfall and that could be used as seed money for construction.