While there are all sorts of charts, statistics, numbers, and so forth, purporting to show the health or lack of health of today's economy, one of the most important numbers and chart, is the labor participation rate. The labor participation rate basically measures the amount of citizens ages 16 and above that are either employed or actively looking for work, as compared against those not employed or not actively looking for work, which wouldinclude retirees, disabled people, students, and those incarcerated. The current American labor participation rate is 62.9% as of September of 2016, which on the surface seems okay, but well below countries such as the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, and Canada, while being higher than Germany, Japan, and Mexico. However, beneath the surface, those numbers don't look nearly so acceptable.
For instance, at the beginning of this century, the labor participation rate in America was 67.3%, demonstrating that the current labor participation rate of 62.9% is a significant and very distressing reduction of around 6.5% of our labor participation rate, from January of 2000. This equates to literally millions of people that are no longer part of the labor participation rate, and while critics contend that the reasonable explanation behind this decline can be attributed to an aging work force, that answer isn't completely candid or satisfying. That is to say, looking specifically at the labor participation rate of those aged 25-54, considered to be the "wheelhouse" of employment and then comparing the labor participation rate for that group against three other mature countries, in this case, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for both male as well as females, the United States has the lowest percentage of labor participation in that group for both male as well as female categories as reported by aei.org for the year 2014. This signifies in a nutshell that America's labor participation rate once adjusted for demographics ranks behind countries such as Japan and Germany.
As much as America desires to tease the numbers to make it seem that all is well, the truth of the matter is, something is fundamentally wrong, as America's labor participation rate has been in a steady decline for this century, somewhat due to the aging of our population, but also significantly due to the fact that a significant portion of those in their prime earning years of 25-54, have given up on finding work. So too does this signify that the "puritan work ethic", that Americans have prided themselves on for generations, has effectively been nullified, perhaps, forever.
In point of fact, as less and less Americans are laboring to support in our welfare state more and more Americans that are not, there will come, sooner or later, a reckoning, when the massive deficits that this nation runs must either be paid back or repudiated, which would as a matter of course, demand from the population, significant belt tightening and grit. For those that do not work, have no desire to work, and won't work, when this event occurs as it surely will, domestic insurrection will occur at unprecedented levels, for idle hands are the devil's workshop.