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In the shadows and forgotten: that's the only way to describe the employment situation for men in this country. The percentage of men ages 25 to 54 who say they're working has fallen from nearly 100% in the 1950s to about 90% today. If you think 90% isn't too bad, consider that this is comparable to the percentage of American men who were working in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression.
That's right. The Biden-Harris economy is the Great Depression for men. And it's made worse by another inescapable statistic: rising costs. Even before the recent inflation spike caused by Biden-Harris policies, the average male worker could no longer provide a middle-class lifestyle for his family. The number of weeks needed to work to cover that cost of living has risen from 40 weeks in 1985 to 62 weeks in 2022, far more than there are weeks in a year.
On Labor Day 2023, I compiled these trends in a report detailing decades of decline in working men's fortunes. This year, the Biden-Harris administration claims to have orchestrated a dramatic comeback for men. But the administration's evidence is merely whitewashing, and unfortunately, the challenges men face remain as formidable as ever.
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Virtually all Americans, whether liberal, conservative or somewhere in between, recognize that these challenges are problems, yet the Biden-Harris administration's response has been to simply pretend to ignore the problems.
Despite the White House's claims, good jobs remain hard for men to find and American manufacturing has not recovered as the administration says. FILE: A steel mill in Middletown, Ohio, October 24, 2022. (Photo by MEGAN JELINGER/AFP via Getty Images)
White House press releases claim that the president and vice president have revitalized American manufacturing, spurred a historic economic recovery, and even chipped away at unemployment, but if you dig a little deeper, it's clear that these claims are just window dressing.
Despite optimistic rhetoric from the White House, manufacturing jobs have been flat to declining over the last year, the quality of manufacturing jobs is declining, and the Administration is sabotaging its own industrial policy by pandering to green energy special interests and progressive social policies.
Meanwhile, as recently as July, real hourly wages were lower than they were when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in 2021. To make matters worse, Biden and Harris's pitch is based on faulty numbers: The Bureau of Labor Statistics significantly overestimated employment totals this year, and its latest revision found that the economy has created 818,000 fewer jobs than previously estimated.
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What about employment, especially for men? The White House proclaimed in August that “the sharp recovery after the pandemic recession has pushed the LFPR (labor force participation rate) of prime-age men above pre-pandemic levels.” This would have been cause for celebration if the White House hadn't omitted a key fact: the cited “recovery” was almost entirely due to immigration.
Employment of native-born Americans, for both men and women, remains 208,000 below pre-pandemic levels. And at the end of 2023, native-born men without a college degree were less likely to participate in the labor force than they were before the pandemic. As I wrote earlier this year, this is the result of deliberate policy decisions: “We deliberately failed to secure our southern border and misguidedly expanded our immigration programs.” Healing our communities? Not at all.
There are practical steps the government can take to improve the lot of working-age men, including strengthening pro-American industrial policies (e.g., expanding tariffs on Chinese products), since manufacturing has traditionally been the mainstay of employment for American men.
These include promoting vocational training in high school, because the transition from high school to college is a transition that young men have a high failure rate for, while skilled trade training tends to improve men's future lives, and eliminating the marriage penalty in the tax code, because married men report earning more and being much happier than unmarried men.
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White House press releases claim that the president and vice president have revitalized American manufacturing, spurred a historic economic recovery, and even chipped away at unemployment, but if you dig a little deeper, it's clear that these claims are just window dressing.
But the Biden-Harris administration seems uninterested in taking such steps. Instead, current leaders are obscuring the problems of working-age men with misleading statistics and waves of low-wage, often illegal, immigrants, undermining their own claims to defend manufacturing and workers. Meanwhile, millions of U.S.-born men continue to languish in low-wage jobs, or worse, without a job.
For our society, the consequences are dire. There is no other way to explain the fact that the male suicide rate, over 23 per 100,000, is the highest in history. If America wants to remain strong in the long and difficult century ahead, we must chart a different course. For no nation can long survive without strong men.
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