"Out-of-work Americans"

Here we go again. Do you remember when we debunked the 47% of Americans pay no taxes claim? SSDD. Drudge reported that 92,594,000 Americans “are not working!” This is a record apparently and the implication is that most of the country has gone onto welfare. That’s utterly false.

Here’s the thing... there are 310,000,000 Americans. Of those, about 84,630,000 million are under 20, meaning they are likely unemployed because they are children or students. Another 39,680,000 are over the age of 65 and should likely be retired. Combining those two groups gives you 124,310,000 million people who aren’t expected to work. Suddenly, the claim that 92,594,000 million Americans aren’t working doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Indeed, these numbers tell us that at least 31,716,000 people who probably shouldn’t be working are working.

So is the Drudge number meaningful? Nope. It’s meaningless because it’s too broad in that it doesn’t factor out those who won’t be working under any circumstances (like a 5 year old) and then it implies something that is false from the overall magnitude of the number: “Lots of people aren’t working!” Well yeah, but they aren’t expected to work, so what’s the problem? In any stable modern economy, about one of three persons will not be working because they are too, young, too old, or something else. In our case, the figure is a little less at 30%. So that's not really bad. In fact, the only way to reduce this number would be to put children to work or to go all Logan’s Run on your elders, and even our fringers can't be expecting that. Well, ok, but no one else would suggest such a thing.

So don't worry about this silly 94 million number.

Now, that’s not to say that the job market is very good. It’s not. According to official statistics, 9.8 million people are unemployed, another 7.5 million are underemployed in “forced” part-time jobs, and 783,000 workers have simply given up. That’s 18 million Americans who could be more productive if the economy was better. That's 18 million people who could be buying homes, buying consumer goods, paying taxes, and not draining benefits. That’s the real number to worry about, not this fake 92 million number. That’s the number that needs to be fixed... and Obama has no plan to fix it.


Unrelated Aside: As an aside, the headlines this weekend screamed about the Baby Boomers become "the roommate generation." Good grief. Reading three sentences into the article finds that the number of cohabiters aged 50 or older is 130,000 households... about 260,000 people. How many people are over 50? Not totally sure, honestly, but there are almost 40 million over 65. So the number is probably around 50 million. In any event, 260,000 out of 40 million people works out to... carry the one... 0.65%. Would you say that the actions of 0.65% of a group make them representative of that group? Apparently, our knee-jerk journalistic community does. "The roommate generation" indeed.