My 22-year-old son lives at home and still depends on his old man for spending money. My profoundest fear is that like Will Ferrell’s character in “Wedding Crashers,” he will never leave the nest.
I’m not alone. There are some 20 million college grads living at home. A 2014 study reported by CNNMoney found that half of kids who are two years out of college rely on their parents to pay some or all of their bills. It’s the new normal for 20-somethings.
Gee, parents sure are getting a great financial return on the $150,000 they’ve shelled out for four years of college.
Sure, some of this dependency reflects an entitlement mentality of those millennials whose parents have given them almost everything they’ve ever wanted. But it also reflects how dismal the economy still is today. Today we have college grads — along with working moms and 60-somethings — flipping burgers at Wendy’s and stocking the aisles at Walmart. Left-wing groups and union leaders are now demanding “a living wage” for jobs that were never intended to be held by heads of households. Who’s against higher wages for American workers? But wasn’t this what Obamanomics was supposed to deliver?
Seven years ago, Barack Obama promised a progressive workers paradise — a recovery from recession that would leave no one behind. Hope and Change would deliver high employment and rising wages. No one bought into this idyllic vision more than college kids.
President Obama and his supporters proclaim that he has saved America from the second Great Depression — a message we will hear again over and over in the months ahead. But even his own voters don’t believe him anymore now that we’ve just ended the seventh summer of no real recovery.
Start with the jobless rate. Yes, unemployment is down to 5.1 percent officially. Raise your hand if you believe that number is even close to accurate. The real unemployment rate — counting labor force departures and workers forced into part-time jobs — is, according to Obama’s Labor Department: 10.5 percent. That number is actually down from more than 15 percent recently, but these still feel like recession rates.
Nearly 90 million Americans over the age of 16 are out of the fulltime workforce, and many millions of them are planted in front of the TV, watching “Seinfeld” reruns and living on food stamps or off their parents because they have given up looking for a good job.
If we had experienced a normal recovery from recession, we’d have roughly 5 million to 6 million more of these Americans working today. With a Reagan-style recovery, more than 8 million additional Americans would be working and collecting a paycheck.
The 100 million-plus Americans who are working are feeling a financial crunch, too. Most of them haven’t seen a pay raise that keeps pace with inflation for a decade.
The Census Bureau has released the latest data on family income, and it has been analyzed by the statisticians at Sentier Research. Through this past June, the median-income family has lost $1,700 in real income since Team Obama took the reins.
The sad irony is that the steepest declines in income have been suffered by blacks, Hispanics, single women and, of course, those stay-at-home millennials. Oddly enough, these groups are Obama voters. They also tend to be congregated on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Imagine the scathing indignation and the cries of racism and sexism if this were the record of an incumbent Republican president, rather than a liberal Democrat. Call it Obama’s “war on women.”
Here’s yet another bitter irony of this president’s labor policies. Obama obsesses over income inequality — almost as fanatically as he does climate change. But the standard measure of income inequality — the so-called Gini coefficient — shows a wider gap between rich and poor than during the George W. Bush years. Using his own metrics, Obamanomics is a dismal failure.
The progressives think that the best way to drive up wages is to smack down businesses as greedy, self-serving and corrupt. But you need an employer before you can have an employee. Sorry, to be anti-business and pro-labor is like being anti-chicken and pro-egg. When Hillary Clinton said this year that “businesses don’t create jobs,” she didn’t misspeak; she was expressing a profound ignorance of how the private sector hiring machine works. Donald Trump said it well: As a businessman, “if I have more money, I can hire more workers.”
The employment recession didn’t start with Obama, but with George W. Bush. Voters are distrustful of both parties and justifiably so. Even the simplest reforms — like building pipelines, or cutting the corporate tax rate, or letting banks lend money to businesses and homebuyers, or requiring work for able-bodied welfare recipients — don’t get done. But a few weeks agothe president was up in the Arctic, lecturing us about climate change. The unemployed probably feel that, if he relishes cold weather so much, he should have stayed there.
Syndicated columnist Stephen Moore is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and author of Who’s the Fairest of Them All? The Truth about Opportunity, Taxes, and Wealth in America. His column appears regularly in the NewBostonPost.
