Fewer Americans are working. Don't blame immigrants or food stamps. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.
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Other popular scapegoats, such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare, did not even move the needle.
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The era of vanishing jobs happened alongside one of the most unusual, disruptive eras in modern economic history — China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its subsequent rise to the top of the global export market.
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Automation also seems to have cost more jobs than it created. Guided by research showing that each robot takes the jobs of about 5.6 workers and that 250,475 robots had been added since 1999, the duo estimated that robots cost the economy another 1.4 million workers.
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Abraham and Kearney used previous research into how teens and adults respond to rising wages to produce a high-end estimate of the impact of minimum wages over this period. Other recent research has found either a small effect or no effect. In the end, they combined those figures to find that about 0.49 million workers were lost.
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the labor force shrank by about 0.36 million as an increasing number of workers drew disability benefits.
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The paper’s most striking finding is not, however, speculation on idle American youths. It is that many of the topics that dominate political discourse about the labor market — such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare — are unlikely to bring back lost jobs.
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There were about 6.5 million former prisoners in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2014, according to the best available data. Assume that 60 percent of them served time as a result of policies implemented since the 1990s, account for their ages, time served, and pre-prison earnings, and you get a conservative estimate of 0.32 million lost jobs.
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Food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) SNAP benefits average about $4.11 per person per day. Able-bodied adults are generally cut off from benefits unless they are working.
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The Affordable Care Act Obamacare went into effect in 2014 and has not had a noticeable impact on jobs to date.
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Working spouses who allow men to stay home While this is a popular theory, the share of men who are not in the labor force but had a working spouse actually fell slightly between 1999 and 2015
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The economists estimated that roughly 0.15 million people were not working because of the expansion of a disability insurance program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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Instead, policymakers should be focusing on the forces that took those jobs in the first place: import competition, automation, incarceration and disability insurance.