A “quiet catastrophe” has befallen America, says George F. Will. Almost unnoticed, millions of American men have left the job market. A study has revealed the percentage of males of prime working age (25 to 54) in jobs today (84.4%) is smaller than it was as the Great Depression neared its end in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14%. Rather than being a product of recession, today’s retreat from the workplace appears to be “largely voluntary”: of the men in this age group who didn’t do any paid work in 2014, only about 15% say they were unemployed because they couldn’t find a job; the rest just didn’t want to find a job, preferring to live on benefits. “In 1965, even high school dropouts were more likely to be in the workforce than are the 25-to-54 males today.” A lot of men, it seems, have given up on the traditional rites of adult life – working for a living, getting married, raising a family. Whether welfare reforms or other policies can reverse this process remains to be seen. Still, one manifestation of this social regression, the rise of Donald Trump, “is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry young men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness”. (George F. Will, The Washington Post, 15 October 2016)
George Will, a crusading conservative, cannot connect the dots. He supports the Republicans (to his credit, not Trump), but cannot see that the Republican strategy of concentrating on lowering taxes for the rich and pandering to the same, and then totally ignoring the interests of the ordinary Republican voter has produced the revolts led by Trump (and Bernie). It’s the policies, stupid!
To me, this seems as much a failure of the Clinton era welfare reforms (which the Republicans supported) as it is a failure of originally Republican policies. The whole point of welfare reform was that it was meant to get people off welfare and into work. But if welfare is still a sustainable life choice for some people, haven’t the reforms not gone far enough?
There’s a danger here. If you are too tough on welfare, the poverty rate will rise, even if society as a whole gets richer. But be too soft on welfare, and the abstinence from work you describe here will be more common. What America has now is a balance between the two, and both problems seems to be quite severe.
I agree that lowering taxes on the rich won’t solve the problem. Tax rates on the wealthy are much lower now than they were in 1965, yet as you quite rightly say, workforce participation is lower.
Having said that, I don’t think a more expansive welfare system would solve the problem either. If calls for a Universal Basic Income go ahead, not working would be more profitable than ever. A more generous benefits system would require higher taxes, and not just for the rich. I fail to see how higher taxes for working would encourage more people to work, even if the minimum wage was higher.
The only scheme guaranteed to work would be to physically force these dropouts to get a job. In the age of liberalism, I doubt that would be popular or politically feasible. In one respect, the Republicans are right. The choice not to work for a living or get married is as much a moral problem as it is an economic one (though I disagree with Will that raising a family is a more moral choice than not to do so.)