Polls show that the age-group of Americans most worried about “affordability” are the 20 and 30 somethings. That’s young millennials and the Gen Z generation.
Why are they so financially stressed out? One reason things seem so unaffordable to young people is that too many aren’t working hard. They are hardly working.
The latest Labor Department data indicate that fewer and fewer males between the ages of 16-24 are in the labor force. It used to be that more than 70% had a job, and now it is less than 60%.
Labor force participation for men even into their 30s is at or near an all-time low. Men without jobs are a prescription for social chaos.
I would argue this is the MOST important age for men to be hard at work, honing their job skills, and on the way to a career that makes them a suitable marriage partner. Marriage rates for young men are down as well. Their lack of work experience and a successful career trajectory is one major reason why.
The earlier in life that men (and women) start working, the more successful they are likely to be in their careers and their lifetime earnings.
Getting young people in the workforce is critical to solving so many of our societal problems. How can tuition, groceries, health care and housing be affordable when so many aren’t earning a paycheck?
To solve this problem will require a societal/cultural shift. Parents need to encourage their high school and especially college kids to be working 10 to 20 hours a week. Watching TV and playing computer games or even being a bookworm is no path to success.
Every city and state should have a teen minimum wage of no more than $5 an hour. The skills that one earns on their first job are invaluable later in life. We need a new ethic that every college student should be working up to 20 hours a week while they are in school in lieu of taking out as much as $100,000 in loans subsidized by taxpayers.
This is a win-win for everyone: Colleges would have to lower their outrageous tuition fees. Kids would learn real life skills while in school. And we could eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt that is often defaulted on.
The college student loan program should be eliminated and replaced by a student work program.
I have long touted the College of the Ozarks model where the tuition is free, but every student pays for college by working 20 hours a week at a job learning life skills. These are some of the most impressive students I’ve met in my visits to dozens of top universities. If the kids pay for the tuition themselves, they value it far more. As the old saying goes, anything easily attained is lightly regarded.
This would also be a good way to get rid of the snowflake mentality where college kids sit in their “safe spaces” and act as though they have a constitutional right to never be offended. With a job they will be quickly disabused of that idea the first time they show up for work and get chewed out by their boss.
Work is hard. Work pays the bills. Work is a virtue. The earlier in life kids learn that lesson, the better – for them and all of us.
The one thing that college students have plenty of is time. We know this from the epidemic of “social activism” on campus. Kids won’t have the luxury of protesting on the streets about the temperature of the planet 50 or 100 years from now if they are working.
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic advisor.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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