Our 94,000,000 Problem

"Going out to the malls these days are like going to the malls on weekends. Sure are a bunch of people, all ages, who are not working..."

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I needed to do some errands. Because of the day, we were later than normal. We don't like to be out too much after 3:30 as traffic really starts to pick up. And it did. When my son-in-law arrived home around 6, I asked him how was the afternoon drive. One word - horrible. Seems like that old saying for rush hour traffic still holds - Tuesday in, Thursday out.

The thought I had about yesterday's traffic was just this - what if we had a normal economy? In other words, what if we had "true full employment"? What if a good chunk of the 94,000,000 folks outside our work force were back in the mix? What would our traffic be like? I dare say with the neglect of our road system by the Met Council, many areas would be at a standstill. We would be LA in the Midwest.

I will not be so shallow to lay all of this on the President's doorstep. But I will put much of it there. True, some is simple demographics. We are getting older as a country. People are retiring and younger people are having fewer and fewer kids. And those who are, often delay the start of child bearing. So right now, we have a crazy, mixed up job market.

Sure, because of the fuzzy math given to us by the U3 employment calculation, everything is sunshine and lolly pops. Unemployment of 5% and change. But here is a nagging question: In many of the stores and restaurants we go into, there are "help wanted" signs. Why are those jobs not instantly filled by some out of that that gigantic crowd of 94,000,000 people? Simple answer - why work when "gaming" the system is so easy. Make more money doing nothing than work for $10 - $15/hour. And that is on the President.

I have told this story before. When I first started working, once in a while I would be home on a sick day. If I needed to run to the drug store to pick up medicine during the day, the roads, the stores were a like ghost town. Some old folks out and about, but that was about it. Today, it is all shapes and sizes. All ages and colors. It is like every day is a Saturday.

I am hopeful our next President really "gets it". He is not a Socialist reformer (sorry Bernie). We need a President, working with Congress, who will scrap business killers like Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare. We need to have common sense once again rule our marketplace. To have as many costly, time consuming, bull crap regulations scrapped. To have a better tax system which will attract foreign businesses rather than cause our local companies to become foreign. 

It was just a couple years ago when jaws were dropping when our "out of labor force" number hit 91,000,000. Now it is 94,000,000. It is a good thing Obama cannot get a third term or without a doubt we could crest 100,000,000 in a few years. Greece, here we come.