Takers, takers, takers

 It's hard to believe I wrote this post more than ten years ago. 

Twelve million new takers on the books

I took a look at St. Louis Fed data today, both the civilian employment to population ratio and the working age civilian population.  I then combined the data into a chart of deltas with their initial values pegged to Dec-2007.  The result is the following:

What does this chart mean?  It means that whilethere are about 2.5 million fewer people employed than in 2007, but that we've also got 12.5 million more people of working age - that is, 15 million more unemployed today than we did five and a half years ago.  This is due to an increasing population that has completely given up trying to find work.  It means, that though the recession destroyed something like eight million jobs and the post recession has created around five million jobs, we've added more than twelve million non-working civilians in the same time. 

That's staggering - utterly and completely staggering.  That means - follow me here - that means that not a single working age person added to our population since 2007 is working.  We've added twelve million takers but not one new producer.  Not one.

 

I thought I might update it after ten years to see how things are going, but that would be rather boring. Sure, I could show that we've added 22 million people to the civilian noninstitutional population and only 13 million to the labor force,  (+8 million takers), but that would just be rehashing old thoughts.

Instead, I tried to find data on age groups. As it turns out, right now there are about 23.3 million Americans older than 75, 33.1 million between 65 and 74, and 211.4 million of "working age," between 15 and 64. 

This is more interesting, because we can find out how many out of these age groups are working. A quick search reveals that 7.3% of those over the age of 75, and 26% of those between the ages of 65 and 74 are working. That comes out to 1.7 and 8.6 million, respectively. Now BLS also says that the civilian labor force (those working) in the US is 168.2 million. Thus, simple math tells us that the numer of people working who are between 15 and 64 is 157.9 million.

We know that the number of working aged people is 211.4 million, so if only 157.9 million of them are working, that means 25.3% of working aged Americans are not doing so - either they have retired or just quit the workforce. These are most likely the real takers, as everyone over 65 is of retirement age and has "earned the right" to retire.

Of course I don't despise anyone who manages to retire early, that is great for them. However those who are just sitting on their asses playing video games and collecting welfare are truly despicable. They likely come from this last group, numbering 53.5 million people. That is more than half of the people not in the labor force. Again, these people are not unemployed, they are not in the labor force at all.

The data reveals that we have 53.5 million people who are of working age (15-64) who have opted out of working. These are the real takers.