Being a therapist for 35 years, I understand denial. I understand the need for the human mind to integrate radically new and difficult information. It hasn’t dawned on most people yet that our government–consisting primarily of DemComs and RINOs–is accountable to NOBODY. That includes the media, who will not question or challenge anything they do. Perhaps when all the people who oppose what’s happening realize it’s not going to stop, and that it’s only going to get worse, we’ll finally start to see some resistance worthy of the name.
Some advice for self-reflection, not just for right now but in the difficult weeks and months that are coming: Consider editing advocates of Communism, fascism, intolerant leftism, “wokeism” — all of the insanity taking over our culture and our daily lives — from your life. I am not talking about business associates or customers. I am talking about personal life. Why should you spend any time with people who want your liberty, your reason, your independence and your prosperity destroyed? Isn’t something deeply and irreparably wrong with such people? If so, what does it itdo to your morale, your self-respect, and your very soul to spend time with them?
These are, after all, people who want you censored, segregated, shunned and perhaps (before much longer) even worse. We are not talking about people who can be reasoned with. Remember: If they still support Biden, his regime, and just everything else that’s going on, then they are supporting the people and movements literally committed to your destruction, and the annihilation of all that you value. Is their company really preferable to the company of a good pet, a fine book or movie, a lovely view of natural beauty, and perhaps decent, rational, freedom-loving and truly life-loving people you have yet to meet?
and unprecedented overreaction to a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was launched in March of 2020, thus unleashing what can best be described as a once-in-a-century fiasco. Nineteen months later it is impossible to look at the United States and the world and not conclude that this country and much of the West is in the grip, not of a virus, but of delusional madness and malevolence.
The governing elites have been so successful in propagandizing and fear-mongering the populace in many western nations, including the United States, that the virus has made far too many people blind to the madness as they wallow in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness — deliberately and with forethought brought about by these malevolent cabals.
The noted British historian Kenneth Clark in his book and television series Civilisation said that empires fall not just to barbarians and other external enemies, but more so on account of exhaustion and loss of confidence within. He warned of the evolutionary process of destruction of self-confidence leading to exhaustion and culminating in the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. As any civilized nation, in order to survive, requires confidence in the society in which one lives as well as belief in its philosophy and in its laws and confidence in one’s own mental powers.
In the United States, the left-wing dominated ruling class, determined to transform the nation into a one-party oligarchy, has long focused on demoralizing and fomenting hopelessness among the American people so they would be amenable to this transformation. In a society already beset with self-doubt and disquiet about the future, they gaslighted the populace through the gross and near-criminal exaggeration of the threat of Covid-19, combined with manipulated data, unprecedented societal and economic lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory masking and now de facto vaccination passports. Thus, exacerbating the feeling of hopelessness among the citizenry.
At the height of the pandemic hysteria in the fall of 2020, 36% of Americans reported symptoms of anxiety disorder (in 2019, 6.5% of Americans reported anxiety disorder). In this same period, 42% of Americans reported anxiety or depressive disorder (in 2019, 10.8% of Americans reported these disorders). The age group 18-39 (30% of the overall U.S. population) had the highest reported levels of anxiety or depressive disorder– 52%.
The manipulation of the public by the ruling class and its media arm has succeeded as nearly half of the overall American population and a majority of the Millennials (America’s most populous generation) are suffering from anxiety or depressive disorders, which inevitably leads to hopelessness.
Having wildly succeeded in fomenting despair, the ruling establishment cannot stop or curtail their tactics as they cannot risk the American people awakening from or becoming aware of their malevolence and delusional madness. Thus, the never-ending Covid-19 falsehoods and fearmongering in order to maintain and exacerbate anxiety and depression.
Having demoralized and created hopelessness among the bulk of the population, the next step for the ruling elites was to remove Donald Trump, install their hand-picked puppet and control Congress. Using the cover of the pandemic, they unabashedly, and in many cases unconstitutionally, altered the election laws in swing states to accommodate massive voter fraud and buried any negative stories about Joe Biden and his family while censoring the alternative media. Thus, unleashing their delusional madness for all the world to see.
The United States is the latest country in a long history dating back to 330 B.C. to leave bloody footprints on the way out of Afghanistan. The incomprehensible tactics in this exit, as executed by Biden and the ruling establishment, has destabilized the world and made it significantly more dangerous than before. Their imbecility in believing the Taliban will be responsible stewards of Afghanistan will precipitate another horror show playing out not only in Afghanistan but throughout the West and in the United States.
The fatuous and Marxist-inspired ruling class believes that unlimited spending on social programs and unbridled money creation will sustain and expand an economy. Consequently, millions of able-bodied Americans are choosing to remain unemployed thanks to ever more generous welfare and unemployment, thus, permanently shuttering businesses throughout the country and severely undermining the economy. As an inevitable byproduct, inflation is also running rampant. Yet, these myopic loons are determined to spend $5 Trillion in new welfare and “Green New Deal” programs. Monies the nation does not have, and which will accelerate yet more inflation and ultimate stagflation leading to a potential global recession/depression.
On the now non-existent southern border, having created one humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, their madcap policies have deliberately created another and quite different humanitarian disaster, one made of unchecked illegal immigration. Allowing terrorist, murderers and sex-traffickers unfettered passage into the country and millions access to welfare, education, health care and low-income jobs. Thus, displacing Americans, further exacerbating economic decline, creating potential health crises and accelerating societal upheaval.
The ruling elites, in their irrationality, have decreed eight-year-olds can choose their gender, take on a new name and use which ever toilets they want — and mom and dad don’t get to hear a word about it. Nor do mom and dad have a say in whether their children must wear potentially harmful masks or be vaccinated with an experimental vaccine or be taught in school that those with white skin are genetically predestined to be oppressors and those with dark skin are hopelessly doomed to be oppressed, or that the planet will self-immolate within 10 years because of the lifestyles of their moms and dads.
The madness is in other countries in the West. In the Australian state of Victoria, they are firing rubber bullets into crowds of protestors as well as physically attacking and jailing them without trial. Australia and New Zealand have almost totally shuttered their countries and in at least one place built a “quarantine camps.” Many nations have initiated vaccine passport schemes to keep the unvaccinated — the unclean — out of the mainstream of society, precipitating the closure of vital medical facilities and security services due to lack of staffing.
It is not the Chinese Coronavirus that will be the undoing of this or any western country. They (we) will be undone — and are being undone now — by the madness and malevolence of their ruling classes.
Many Americans and citizens in other Western nations know what is happening is wrong and will lead to chaos and a dark place. Yet far too many are fearful of being shouted down, ostracized and censored for saying so. But that cannot be an excuse to remain quiet — on the contrary, that must be the inspiration to speak out in every forum available from one’s family, to one’s neighborhood, to one’s town, to one’s state.
This can be fixed, and a nation restored, if enough join together stand up and emulate Howard Beale in the classic movie Network and shout from the rooftops: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!
How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.
I’m certainly not the first person to make note of this shocking statistic. You’ve heard people bemoaning this “labor participation rate,” which is simply the number of working-age men (usually counted as ages 16 to 64) who are working or are seeking work, as a percentage of the overall labor force.
It’s true that the pandemic, which of course produced a number of factors that made working more difficult never mind dangerous, pushed the labor participation rate to a record low. But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades. In fact, the participation rate for men peaked at 87.4% in October 1949 and has been dropping steadily ever since. It now stands at 67.7%.
As a business journalist for a good portion of those 70-plus years, I’ve looked at thousands of charts and graphs in my life, and I have to say this one is as jaw dropping as it is vexing:
Chart of the U.S. labor force participation rate for men over time, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve
Economists, sociologists, politicians, and cable news pundits each have their pet factors to explain the groundswell of non-work. But after digging down here, I’ve concluded there are many different forces at play. That’s what I want to explore today, which is: how men can live in America without working.
I’m not talking about why men have lost their jobs — factories closing, layoffs, automation, outsourcing jobs overseas, even perhaps women entering the workforce, (in fact, the participation rate by women over the same time period is way up). What I want to get at is how they’re living without holding a “real” job, and by that I mean doing work where one reports income to the IRS, pays taxes and Social Security, etc.
It’s important to note that every man in this group has his own story. They range from mentally ill homeless men who desperately need our help, to the I’m-doing-just-fine-thank-you-very-much, retired early, and former Silicon Valley coder. And there are infinite scenarios in between those two extremes, including, for instance, the many men who have chosen to be stay-at-home dads while their spouses work.
It’s also the case that some men in this group may be unemployed and not seeking work because they’ve given up looking just for now — perhaps waiting for COVID to abate — and will start the search again soon. Here too, society needs to help.
Still, none of this explains decade after decade of falling male employment.
To that end, here to my mind are seven ways men are living without working in America:
-Unemployment insurance
Let’s start with this one because it’s a hot button issue. Conservatives and some liberals too have made the claim that state unemployment aid, coupled with $600 a week from the CARES Act, which was rolled out in March 2020, have reduced men’s need to work. (There are actually a variety of social programs at play, spelled out nicely here by think tank The Century Foundation, which estimates that overall these programs have pumped $800 billion in the economy.) We’ll be getting a good read on whether all this relief did suppress employment now that CARES aid ended for some 7.5 million Americans earlier this month. But as Yahoo Finance’s Denitsa Tsekova reported here and here, states that ended federal aid programs early didn’t see big increases in employment. That may mean these payments really weren’t enough to live off, or not enough to live off by themselves, which speaks to men looking to a combination of sources, like under the table income or family support and possibly some savings (see below).
-Early retirement, pensions, disability and lawsuits
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hodgepodge. And as is the case with many of these categories, hard data is tough to come by, but it is the case that millions of men under 64 are at least partly living off of pensions and 401(k)s. This would include everything from C-suite executives to union members. And don’t forget municipal workers, who make up almost 14% of the U.S. workforce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are some 6,000 public sector retirement systems in the U.S. Collectively these plans have $4.5 trillion in assets, with 14.7 million working members and 11.2 million retirees. The plans distribute $323 billion in benefits annually, and again, some to men who are younger than 64. In fact in almost two-thirds of these plans, if you started working at 25, you max out at 57, a real inducement to stop working — at least at that job of course.
Volunteers load cars with turkeys and other food assistance for laid off Walt Disney World cast members and others at a food distribution event on December 12, 2020 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
You argue all day about the right or wrong when it comes to these payouts, but the fact is many of them didn’t exist, or not at this magnitude, decades ago.
-Savings, trading stocks, and bitcoin
Consider now men are living off savings, or from money made in the market or maybe even selling NFTs. How many is it exactly? Who knows, but quite a few for sure. First off, Americans on average do have some money in the bank. Savings as a percentage of disposable income, according to the Federal Reserve of Kansas City, hit a record high of 33% in the spring of 2020 and is still at 14%, or nearly twice as high as it was prior to the pandemic.
And according to a recent survey by Northwestern Mutual, average personal savings are up over 10% compared to last year, from $65,900 last year to $73,100. Average retirement savings increased 13%, from $87,500 last year to $98,800 today. So there’s that.
Next let’s look at investing — first stocks. It is not irrelevant to this narrative that the S&P 500 has climbed from 2,480 on March 12, 2020 — the day after the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic— to 4,441 today, or almost 80%. That’s a huge gain. Much of the action of course has been retail investors and the meme stock boom, as millions of American males stuck at home with nothing to do all day for the past 18 months passed the time trading stocks. Credit Suisse estimates that since the beginning of 2020, “retail trading as a share of overall market activity has nearly doubled from between 15% and 18% to over 30%,” as CNBC reported. How many men were doing this and supporting themselves? Unclear, but upstart trading platform Robinhood (HOOD) — the broker dealer of choice for many of these new investors — reported that it had 22.5 million funded user accounts last month, up from 7.2 million in March of 2020. Let’s just say 15 million new accounts is quite a number.
Now crypto. You can laugh all you want, but the simple fact is that the price of bitcoin is up from $4,861 on March 12, 2020 to $47,763 today, or basically up 10X, (and remember it even hit $64,888.99 this spring). Back to Robinhood, which according to The New York Times, also reported last month that “revenue from cryptocurrency trading fees totaled $233 million, a nearly 50-fold jump from $5 million a year earlier.” (And those are just fees off the trades, mind you.) Bottom line: Folks have made money here. (Of course these guys should be paying taxes on all those stock and crypto gains.)
Robinhood Markets, Inc. CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev and co-founder Baiju Bhatt pose with Robinhood signage on Wall Street after the company’s IPO in New York City, U.S., July 29, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
-Working for cash, aka the under-the-table economy
This one is very tough to measure, too. A study by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis estimates that the average size of the “informal economy” in developed countries is 13% of GDP. Honestly, that could be off by many percentage points, but just to give you a ballpark, GDP in the U.S. this year is about $22 trillion. So 13% of that is $2.86 trillion. As it turns out, $2 trillion-plus, is a number that has been thrown around quite a bit (here and here for instance) when it comes to estimating the size of the cash economy in the U.S. Even if half that money is paid out to women, that still leaves, say, $1 trillion dollars being made by men in this country off the books. That’s a big chunk of change. Are more people than ever working for cash these days? Again, another question that’s impossible to answer. I would bet it’s not fewer. For example, my electrician Luis just told me he can’t get anyone to work for him anymore — they all want to get paid in cash.
-Living off family members
Just to take one facet,the Pew Research Center reported last year that the pandemic “has pushed millions of Americans, especially young adults, to move in with family members. The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since U.S. coronavirus cases began spreading [in early 2020], surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era. In July, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February.” How many of these individuals are males living rent free (and sharing food too), which maybe means they don’t have to work? Who knows, but some. Ditto for males who have moved in with in-laws or siblings. And again, many men are choosing to stay home and take care of kids while their spouses work.
-Illegal work
Front and center here is selling illegal drugs. Sadly, business looks to be booming, that is if overdoses are any sort of measure. According to the Washington Post, overdose deaths hit 93,000 last year, up a stunning 30% from 2019. Most of the overdoses were attributed to opioids; heroin, synthetic opioids like OxyContin and in particular Fentanyl. (This despite drug dealers facing supply chain issues during COVID.) How many Americans are in this business and who are they? A number is almost impossible to come by here, but as for who they are, a government report on drug trafficking arrests from five years ago notes that ”the majority of drug trafficking offenders were male (84.9%), the average age of these offenders at sentencing was 36 years, 70% were United States citizens (although this rate varied substantially depending on the type of drug involved), and that almost half (49.4%) of drug traffickers had little or no prior criminal history.” How big a business is selling drugs in America? Could be as much as $100 billion. I think it’s fair to say that a market that size requires many thousands of employees.
What about other types of crime and criminals, everything from robbers and thieves to prostitutes and pimps? To that point there are some 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. right now. (We have the highest absolute number and the highest per capita on the planet, and hold some 25% of the world’s total prisoners, according to the ACLU.) Being in prison is another way of living in America without working, I guess. But not counting those locked up, how many bad guys are out there on the street? Conservatively, it has to be thousands and thousands, and speaking to this story, they’re all doing their thing and not participating in the labor force.
ORLEANS, MASSACHUSETTS – JULY 10: A man holds onto a clamming rake while clamming at low tide July 10, 2021 in Town Cove, Orleans, Massachusetts. He filled a bushel basket of cherry stone clams. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
-Living off the land
This would include gardening, fishing, hunting, clamming, berrying, and just general foraging. The numbers here seem to be climbing. Here for instance from The Guardian:
“Fishing and hunting license sales increased 10% in California during the pandemic, reversing years of decline. Clamming has grown in popularity for several reasons: people are looking for safe activities to do outdoors, but also some are clamming for subsistence and trying to get money from selling the shellfish (which is illegal without a commercial license).”
“From the start of the 2020 licensing year in May through Dec. 31, WDFW [Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife] sold nearly 45,000 more fishing licenses and 12,000 more hunting licenses than 2019. The number of new license holders — defined as someone who hadn’t purchased one for the previous five years — went up 16% for fishing licenses and almost 40% for hunters.”
As for growing vegetables in home gardens, yes, it is up, way up too. Even before the pandemic, there were estimates that a third of American families grew vegetables. Now this, NPR reported last year:
“‘We’re being flooded with vegetable orders,’ says George Ball, executive chairman of the Burpee Seed Company, based in Warminster, Penn.
Ball says he has noticed spikes in seed sales during bad times: the stock market crash of 1987, the dot com bubble burst of 2000, and he remembers the two oil crises of the 1970s from his childhood. But he says he has not seen a spike this large and widespread.
So there you have it. It’s a whole range of ways and means, behaviors and experiences. I’m sure I missed some, too. Again, some non-working men are in dire straits and need our help. Others are living non-working lives without burdening society or others, such as a fireman on early retirement (though some argue municipal employee pensions are too high), or an investor who made a ton of money in the market and called it quits, or maybe a wilderness guy living off the land in Alaska.
And some non-working men are not playing fair. Like getting paid under the table, fudging insurance claims or social programs. Some freeload off relatives. And some engage in overtly illegal behavior like boosting branded goods from chain stores to sell online or dealing heroin.
I would imagine that more than a few of these men create a portfolio of sources, though I’m not sure they really think of it that way. Take for example a hypothetical guy in a rural area who lives with his grandmother rent free, (he does help her with the garden some). This guy also does some cash carpentry work, hunts for game, gets some food off his ex-wife’s WIC and helps his brother sell some weed. Can you get by this way? Some men probably are. Is this the new American way? For some men it probably is.
That example perhaps, and to be sure of all of the above, I think go a long way toward explaining that chart from the beginning of the story, the one that shows the labor participation rate falling off a cliff over the past seven decades. And speaking of charts, another striking one came to mind when I was writing this, which I put here below. It shows U.S. GDP over the same time period as the labor participation rate.
Chart of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product over time, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve
Of course, the line on this GDP chart is inversely correlated with the line on the labor participation graph. And I think there is a relationship between the two. Which is to say, the wealthier our nation has become over the decades, the less men are working. Fact is there is just a ton of money sloshing around in our country. And men seem to be able to get their hands on it, whether obtained legally, borrowed, leeched off of or stolen.
It seems like working legally to provide for yourself in America is really just one option these days.
This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on September 18, 2021. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday.
Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!
How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.
I’m certainly not the first person to make note of this shocking statistic. You’ve heard people bemoaning this “labor participation rate,” which is simply the number of working-age men (usually counted as ages 16 to 64) who are working or are seeking work, as a percentage of the overall labor force.
It’s true that the pandemic, which of course produced a number of factors that made working more difficult never mind dangerous, pushed the labor participation rate to a record low. But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades. In fact, the participation rate for men peaked at 87.4% in October 1949 and has been dropping steadily ever since. It now stands at 67.7%.
As a business journalist for a good portion of those 70-plus years, I’ve looked at thousands of charts and graphs in my life, and I have to say this one is as jaw dropping as it is vexing:
Chart of the U.S. labor force participation rate for men over time, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve
Economists, sociologists, politicians, and cable news pundits each have their pet factors to explain the groundswell of non-work. But after digging down here, I’ve concluded there are many different forces at play. That’s what I want to explore today, which is: how men can live in America without working.
I’m not talking about why men have lost their jobs — factories closing, layoffs, automation, outsourcing jobs overseas, even perhaps women entering the workforce, (in fact, the participation rate by women over the same time period is way up). What I want to get at is how they’re living without holding a “real” job, and by that I mean doing work where one reports income to the IRS, pays taxes and Social Security, etc.
It’s important to note that every man in this group has his own story. They range from mentally ill homeless men who desperately need our help, to the I’m-doing-just-fine-thank-you-very-much, retired early, and former Silicon Valley coder. And there are infinite scenarios in between those two extremes, including, for instance, the many men who have chosen to be stay-at-home dads while their spouses work.
It’s also the case that some men in this group may be unemployed and not seeking work because they’ve given up looking just for now — perhaps waiting for COVID to abate — and will start the search again soon. Here too, society needs to help.
Still, none of this explains decade after decade of falling male employment.
To that end, here to my mind are seven ways men are living without working in America:
-Unemployment insurance
Let’s start with this one because it’s a hot button issue. Conservatives and some liberals too have made the claim that state unemployment aid, coupled with $600 a week from the CARES Act, which was rolled out in March 2020, have reduced men’s need to work. (There are actually a variety of social programs at play, spelled out nicely here by think tank The Century Foundation, which estimates that overall these programs have pumped $800 billion in the economy.) We’ll be getting a good read on whether all this relief did suppress employment now that CARES aid ended for some 7.5 million Americans earlier this month. But as Yahoo Finance’s Denitsa Tsekova reported here and here, states that ended federal aid programs early didn’t see big increases in employment. That may mean these payments really weren’t enough to live off, or not enough to live off by themselves, which speaks to men looking to a combination of sources, like under the table income or family support and possibly some savings (see below).
-Early retirement, pensions, disability and lawsuits
Admittedly, this is a bit of a hodgepodge. And as is the case with many of these categories, hard data is tough to come by, but it is the case that millions of men under 64 are at least partly living off of pensions and 401(k)s. This would include everything from C-suite executives to union members. And don’t forget municipal workers, who make up almost 14% of the U.S. workforce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are some 6,000 public sector retirement systems in the U.S. Collectively these plans have $4.5 trillion in assets, with 14.7 million working members and 11.2 million retirees. The plans distribute $323 billion in benefits annually, and again, some to men who are younger than 64. In fact in almost two-thirds of these plans, if you started working at 25, you max out at 57, a real inducement to stop working — at least at that job of course.
Volunteers load cars with turkeys and other food assistance for laid off Walt Disney World cast members and others at a food distribution event on December 12, 2020 in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
You argue all day about the right or wrong when it comes to these payouts, but the fact is many of them didn’t exist, or not at this magnitude, decades ago.
-Savings, trading stocks, and bitcoin
Consider now men are living off savings, or from money made in the market or maybe even selling NFTs. How many is it exactly? Who knows, but quite a few for sure. First off, Americans on average do have some money in the bank. Savings as a percentage of disposable income, according to the Federal Reserve of Kansas City, hit a record high of 33% in the spring of 2020 and is still at 14%, or nearly twice as high as it was prior to the pandemic.
And according to a recent survey by Northwestern Mutual, average personal savings are up over 10% compared to last year, from $65,900 last year to $73,100. Average retirement savings increased 13%, from $87,500 last year to $98,800 today. So there’s that.
Next let’s look at investing — first stocks. It is not irrelevant to this narrative that the S&P 500 has climbed from 2,480 on March 12, 2020 — the day after the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic— to 4,441 today, or almost 80%. That’s a huge gain. Much of the action of course has been retail investors and the meme stock boom, as millions of American males stuck at home with nothing to do all day for the past 18 months passed the time trading stocks. Credit Suisse estimates that since the beginning of 2020, “retail trading as a share of overall market activity has nearly doubled from between 15% and 18% to over 30%,” as CNBC reported. How many men were doing this and supporting themselves? Unclear, but upstart trading platform Robinhood (HOOD) — the broker dealer of choice for many of these new investors — reported that it had 22.5 million funded user accounts last month, up from 7.2 million in March of 2020. Let’s just say 15 million new accounts is quite a number.
Now crypto. You can laugh all you want, but the simple fact is that the price of bitcoin is up from $4,861 on March 12, 2020 to $47,763 today, or basically up 10X, (and remember it even hit $64,888.99 this spring). Back to Robinhood, which according to The New York Times, also reported last month that “revenue from cryptocurrency trading fees totaled $233 million, a nearly 50-fold jump from $5 million a year earlier.” (And those are just fees off the trades, mind you.) Bottom line: Folks have made money here. (Of course these guys should be paying taxes on all those stock and crypto gains.)
Robinhood Markets, Inc. CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev and co-founder Baiju Bhatt pose with Robinhood signage on Wall Street after the company’s IPO in New York City, U.S., July 29, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
-Working for cash, aka the under-the-table economy
This one is very tough to measure, too. A study by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis estimates that the average size of the “informal economy” in developed countries is 13% of GDP. Honestly, that could be off by many percentage points, but just to give you a ballpark, GDP in the U.S. this year is about $22 trillion. So 13% of that is $2.86 trillion. As it turns out, $2 trillion-plus, is a number that has been thrown around quite a bit (here and here for instance) when it comes to estimating the size of the cash economy in the U.S. Even if half that money is paid out to women, that still leaves, say, $1 trillion dollars being made by men in this country off the books. That’s a big chunk of change. Are more people than ever working for cash these days? Again, another question that’s impossible to answer. I would bet it’s not fewer. For example, my electrician Luis just told me he can’t get anyone to work for him anymore — they all want to get paid in cash.
-Living off family members
Just to take one facet,the Pew Research Center reported last year that the pandemic “has pushed millions of Americans, especially young adults, to move in with family members. The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents has become a majority since U.S. coronavirus cases began spreading [in early 2020], surpassing the previous peak during the Great Depression era. In July, 52% of young adults resided with one or both of their parents, up from 47% in February.” How many of these individuals are males living rent free (and sharing food too), which maybe means they don’t have to work? Who knows, but some. Ditto for males who have moved in with in-laws or siblings. And again, many men are choosing to stay home and take care of kids while their spouses work.
-Illegal work
Front and center here is selling illegal drugs. Sadly, business looks to be booming, that is if overdoses are any sort of measure. According to the Washington Post, overdose deaths hit 93,000 last year, up a stunning 30% from 2019. Most of the overdoses were attributed to opioids; heroin, synthetic opioids like OxyContin and in particular Fentanyl. (This despite drug dealers facing supply chain issues during COVID.) How many Americans are in this business and who are they? A number is almost impossible to come by here, but as for who they are, a government report on drug trafficking arrests from five years ago notes that ”the majority of drug trafficking offenders were male (84.9%), the average age of these offenders at sentencing was 36 years, 70% were United States citizens (although this rate varied substantially depending on the type of drug involved), and that almost half (49.4%) of drug traffickers had little or no prior criminal history.” How big a business is selling drugs in America? Could be as much as $100 billion. I think it’s fair to say that a market that size requires many thousands of employees.
What about other types of crime and criminals, everything from robbers and thieves to prostitutes and pimps? To that point there are some 2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. right now. (We have the highest absolute number and the highest per capita on the planet, and hold some 25% of the world’s total prisoners, according to the ACLU.) Being in prison is another way of living in America without working, I guess. But not counting those locked up, how many bad guys are out there on the street? Conservatively, it has to be thousands and thousands, and speaking to this story, they’re all doing their thing and not participating in the labor force.
ORLEANS, MASSACHUSETTS – JULY 10: A man holds onto a clamming rake while clamming at low tide July 10, 2021 in Town Cove, Orleans, Massachusetts. He filled a bushel basket of cherry stone clams. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
-Living off the land
This would include gardening, fishing, hunting, clamming, berrying, and just general foraging. The numbers here seem to be climbing. Here for instance from The Guardian:
“Fishing and hunting license sales increased 10% in California during the pandemic, reversing years of decline. Clamming has grown in popularity for several reasons: people are looking for safe activities to do outdoors, but also some are clamming for subsistence and trying to get money from selling the shellfish (which is illegal without a commercial license).”
“From the start of the 2020 licensing year in May through Dec. 31, WDFW [Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife] sold nearly 45,000 more fishing licenses and 12,000 more hunting licenses than 2019. The number of new license holders — defined as someone who hadn’t purchased one for the previous five years — went up 16% for fishing licenses and almost 40% for hunters.”
As for growing vegetables in home gardens, yes, it is up, way up too. Even before the pandemic, there were estimates that a third of American families grew vegetables. Now this, NPR reported last year:
“‘We’re being flooded with vegetable orders,’ says George Ball, executive chairman of the Burpee Seed Company, based in Warminster, Penn.
Ball says he has noticed spikes in seed sales during bad times: the stock market crash of 1987, the dot com bubble burst of 2000, and he remembers the two oil crises of the 1970s from his childhood. But he says he has not seen a spike this large and widespread.
So there you have it. It’s a whole range of ways and means, behaviors and experiences. I’m sure I missed some, too. Again, some non-working men are in dire straits and need our help. Others are living non-working lives without burdening society or others, such as a fireman on early retirement (though some argue municipal employee pensions are too high), or an investor who made a ton of money in the market and called it quits, or maybe a wilderness guy living off the land in Alaska.
And some non-working men are not playing fair. Like getting paid under the table, fudging insurance claims or social programs. Some freeload off relatives. And some engage in overtly illegal behavior like boosting branded goods from chain stores to sell online or dealing heroin.
I would imagine that more than a few of these men create a portfolio of sources, though I’m not sure they really think of it that way. Take for example a hypothetical guy in a rural area who lives with his grandmother rent free, (he does help her with the garden some). This guy also does some cash carpentry work, hunts for game, gets some food off his ex-wife’s WIC and helps his brother sell some weed. Can you get by this way? Some men probably are. Is this the new American way? For some men it probably is.
That example perhaps, and to be sure of all of the above, I think go a long way toward explaining that chart from the beginning of the story, the one that shows the labor participation rate falling off a cliff over the past seven decades. And speaking of charts, another striking one came to mind when I was writing this, which I put here below. It shows U.S. GDP over the same time period as the labor participation rate.
Chart of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product over time, courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve
Of course, the line on this GDP chart is inversely correlated with the line on the labor participation graph. And I think there is a relationship between the two. Which is to say, the wealthier our nation has become over the decades, the less men are working. Fact is there is just a ton of money sloshing around in our country. And men seem to be able to get their hands on it, whether obtained legally, borrowed, leeched off of or stolen.
It seems like working legally to provide for yourself in America is really just one option these days.
Following revelations that Federal Reserve officials made trades in financial assets while the Fed was taking extraordinary efforts to “stimulate” the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ordered a review of the Fed’s ethics rules. While these trades appear problematic, they pale in comparison to the biggest Fed scandal — the Fed’s impoverishment of ordinary Americans, enrichment of the elites, and facilitation of government debt and deficits.
The depression induced by coronavirus, though really caused by so-called public health actions government took in response, was the official reason for the Fed’s increased asset purchases last year. However, the Fed actually started ramping up its money creating activities in September of 2019, when it began pouring billions a day into the repo markets, which banks use to make short-term loans to each other, in order to keep repo market interest rates low.
Coronavirus was just a convenient excuse for the Fed to do more of what it was already doing. Now, the Fed is using the limited reopening as a scapegoat for rising prices. Of course, anyone who understands Austrian economics understands that rising prices are a symptom, not a cause, of inflation. Inflation is the very act of money creation by the Fed.
Rising prices that diminish the average American’s standard of living are not the only result of the Fed’s manipulation of the money supply. The manipulation distorts economic signals, producing results including booms, bubbles, and busts.
Inflation has always benefited the well-connected elites who receive the Fed’s newly created money before the new money causes widespread price increases. The true motivation behind Fed policies was revealed by former Fed official Andrew Huszar in 2013. Huszar, writing for the Wall Street Journal, confirmed that quantitative easing kept stock prices high, instead of helping Americans struggling with the aftereffects of the 2008 meltdown.
Other beneficiaries of the Fed are big-spending politicians. The Federal Reserve’s purchase of federal debt instruments keeps the federal government’s debt servicing costs manageable. This is why, despite Chairman Powell’s recent suggestion that the Fed will soon begin “tapering” its purchases of Treasuries, the Fed is unlikely to significantly reduce its purchase of Treasuries or allow interest rates to significantly increase.
Powell is also unlikely to upset President Biden and Biden’s congressional allies as long as progressives are urging Biden not to reappoint Powell. Progressives want to replace Powell with someone more committed to fighting climate change and systemic racism, two boogeymen routinely bought out as excuses for vast expansions in government spending and power.
Another major scandal involving the Fed is Congress’ refusal to pass the Audit the Fed bill and let the American people know the truth about the Fed’s operations. Audit the Fed authorizes a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Fed’s dealing with foreign governments and central banks, the Fed’s discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market transactions. Audit the Fed would finally reveal the truth about the Fed’s operations.
A limited audit authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act found that between 2007 and 2010, the Federal Reserve committed over 16 trillion dollars to foreign central banks and politically influential private companies. Imagine what a full audit would find. It is time to end the scandal of allowing a secretive central bank to have so much power over the economy and our liberty. It is time to audit, and end, the Fed.
The booing continues at sports stadiums. Keep it up. Dissension is American. This mandate-making freak is an American profanity, as are all who still support him. He’s an unprecedented fusion of stupidity and evil. We won’t survive 4 full years of his regime, or his party. We simply won’t.
This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction.
The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so forth. And can we really count on private charity to fully provide for all the situations of genuine need among the population? Thus the result: Although the details vary greatly, every country with an advanced economy has an extensive system of “need”-based distributions of benefits to those designated as needy. But how many and which people should receive benefits, and how much?
In practice, the number of beneficiaries and level of generosity of a social safety net are inherently unstable. As soon as such a safety net comes into existence, there must inevitably be a line drawn between those who qualify for the benefits and distributions and those who do not. There will always be some elements of arbitrariness in the line-drawing; and the difference in “neediness” between the least-needy person who qualifies for benefits and the most-needy person who does not qualify may be so small as to be imperceptible. So shouldn’t the benefits then be expanded to include the next guy up the ladder? And how about the next guy after that?
An even worse problem than the fineness of the necessary distinctions is the arbitrariness. No matter how carefully eligibility criteria may be crafted, I submit that there will inevitably be many less needy people who qualify for and receive government safety-net benefits, while objectively more needy people fail to qualify. As one obvious example, some people with no income or significant assets at all may nonetheless be able to draw on substantial family resources (from parents, siblings, children, or more distant relatives) in times of need, while others may have just enough income or assets to fail to qualify but no family back-up of any kind. I personally know multiple twenty-somethings with well-off parents who nevertheless qualify for and use the Medicaid and food stamp programs. You probably do too. Hey, nobody said that parental income is part of the eligibility criteria!
Back in 2017 I had a post about downtown Manhattan City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who at the time of her election lived in subsidized “affordable” housing (via a federal housing voucher), even though her husband was the son of a partner of the law firm of Cravath, Swain & Moore — average per partner income of over $3 million per year. When caught, Rivera and the husband did not slink away in shame, but rather aggressively claimed that they had done nothing wrong — they had reported their “income” (including a substantial write-off for the husband’s business) accurately in the year in which they qualified for the voucher. Rivera remains as a sttting City Councilwoman today.
Let’s compare how families deal with lack of independence among members, to how governments deal with the same issue:
-Families. Nearly all families deal at various times with the issue of transitioning members, generally offspring, from being dependent on family support to being independent and on their own. Sometimes the transition happens without need for much of a push from the parents, and other times a big push may be in order. But essentially all parents that I have known (and almost all of my friends of my generation have gone through this) have made it a priority to encourage and cajole and help the kids to become independent. I have observed every sort of technique being deployed, for example: gradually reduce and ultimately eliminate direct financial support; demand that the kid get a job; cut off payment for the cell phone; demand rent for continuing to live in the family house or, in the end, throw the kid out of the house; make the kid take care of the dog and the plants; put the kid to work for a family business; etc., etc. These techniques and others may ultimately fail, particularly in the case of children with some kind of serious mental or physical disability. Still, I have never observed a family where developing independence of the kids was not at least an important goal.
-Government “safety net.” The issue is essentially the same, and the goal should be the same. But instead, in the real world, the dynamic is the exact opposite. Here are three factors that come into play:
– The safety net programs are run by bureaucracies, and the fundamental imperative of every bureaucracy is to grow the bureaucracy. In the case of safety net programs, growing the bureaucracy means increasing the number of clients of the programs, rather than decreasing them. The bureaucrats are happy to sign up new beneficiaries, and it is no part of their priorities to try to move beneficiaries off the program and into independence.
– Potential beneficiaries realize that the bureaucracies are soft touches, and quickly learn how to present themselves to qualify for handouts. Where mom and dad would not be fooled for a minute, the bureaucrats are eager for more clients and only too happy to help create and maintain dependency.
– And then there are the elected officials in the legislative and executive branches. Many to most of them recognize the beneficiaries of handout programs as bought votes who will remain loyal to the incumbents as long the the programs and the benefit streams are maintained. This is clearly a fundamental strategy of the Democratic Party, although I would not say that Republicans are innocent on the issue.
And thus we come to the current blunderbuss Democrat “budget reconciliation” bill, stuffed with new and expanded “need”-based distributions to expand the “safety net,” from child care payments and tax credits, to higher education subsidies, to expanded Medicaid, to more home health services, and on and on. (Nobody even knows everything that is included.). The whole idea is a massive increase in the numbers of people relying on a government handout.
In general, the pushback to this bill from Republicans has been that all this is wildly expensive and unaffordable, and will be extremely destructive of the economy. All of that I agree with. But the much bigger issue is the transformation of the basic relationship between the people and the government into a situation where many more, and probably most people will expect to be taking government handouts and support that they don’t really need and could very easily live without. Who looks on this as a good thing? Shouldn’t the goal be to have as many people as possible develop the ability to live independently, without government support? It’s terrible for people to live on government handouts. It saps the spirit. Who would want it?
Yesterday the UK Telegraph reported that the UK is on the brink of joining the EU Covid Vaccine passport scheme. Essentially British and European peoples will not be able to leave their homes without the passport.
The propagandists for the agenda make the restriction of freedom of movement sound like a great advantage. They say that “the EU Digital Covid Certificate should make traveling in Europe easier and cheaper for British tourists.”
“The EU Digital Covid Certificate has quickly become the biggest vaccine passport scheme in the world and coves more than 40 countries, including all 27 EU states and others as far afield as Israel and Panama.”
People all over Europe, and especially in France, have been, and are, in the streets protesting this restriction on freedom of movement, but Paul Charles, a travel agent executive, claims the use of the Digital Certificate for entry to restaurants, bars and other venues in France has proved popular with the public.
Paul Charles says that “more people have got vaccinated as a result” of the restriction. Consequently the French have seen their infection rates “drop significantly because of this measure.” If this is true, it is contrary to the experience elsewhere. The data is clear that the most vaccinated countries, such as Israel, are experiencing the highest rate of new infections, and the evidence is clear that the new Covid victims are the vaccinated.
Many experts believe that the mRNA vaccine itself results in adverse reactions that are mislabeled new Covid cases and in the appearance of variants. Thus, new cases rise with vaccination. Experts say that the latest round of vaccinations will result in a new wave of fear this winter that governments will exploit to impose more societal controls.
Paul Charles says that the Digital Covid Certificate “is not for the short term. Governments are getting used to it.” In other words, the “Free West” is institutionalizing the internal passport of the Stalinist regime.
Of course, many reassurances come with the introduction of the totalitarian scheme described as “public health protection.” “Our vaccination status must never be allowed to determine our ability to live freely in our democracy,” which is precisely what it does do. The scheme “only has an initial license to run for 12 months” and privacy is protected by limiting personal data “to what is necessary.”
Anyone who believes that governments give up powers rather than expand them is gullible beyond belief.
Without any doubt the “Free West” has succumbed to Global Health Security. The orchestration of a Covid Pandemic has succeeded in its aim.
Yesterday the UK Telegraph reported that the UK is on the brink of joining the EU Covid Vaccine passport scheme. Essentially British and European peoples will not be able to leave their homes without the passport.
The propagandists for the agenda make the restriction of freedom of movement sound like a great advantage. They say that “the EU Digital Covid Certificate should make traveling in Europe easier and cheaper for British tourists.”
“The EU Digital Covid Certificate has quickly become the biggest vaccine passport scheme in the world and coves more than 40 countries, including all 27 EU states and others as far afield as Israel and Panama.”
People all over Europe, and especially in France, have been, and are, in the streets protesting this restriction on freedom of movement, but Paul Charles, a travel agent executive, claims the use of the Digital Certificate for entry to restaurants, bars and other venues in France has proved popular with the public.
Paul Charles says that “more people have got vaccinated as a result” of the restriction. Consequently the French have seen their infection rates “drop significantly because of this measure.” If this is true, it is contrary to the experience elsewhere. The data is clear that the most vaccinated countries, such as Israel, are experiencing the highest rate of new infections, and the evidence is clear that the new Covid victims are the vaccinated.
Many experts believe that the mRNA vaccine itself results in adverse reactions that are mislabeled new Covid cases and in the appearance of variants. Thus, new cases rise with vaccination. Experts say that the latest round of vaccinations will result in a new wave of fear this winter that governments will exploit to impose more societal controls.
Paul Charles says that the Digital Covid Certificate “is not for the short term. Governments are getting used to it.” In other words, the “Free West” is institutionalizing the internal passport of the Stalinist regime.
Of course, many reassurances come with the introduction of the totalitarian scheme described as “public health protection.” “Our vaccination status must never be allowed to determine our ability to live freely in our democracy,” which is precisely what it does do. The scheme “only has an initial license to run for 12 months” and privacy is protected by limiting personal data “to what is necessary.”
Anyone who believes that governments give up powers rather than expand them is gullible beyond belief.
Without any doubt the “Free West” has succumbed to Global Health Security. The orchestration of a Covid Pandemic has succeeded in its aim.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 