Is America hard at work? Or hardly working?
I ask this because Thursday's Labor Department report for June found yet another 430,000 Americans of working age (16 and older) dropped out of the workforce.
Over the last year, only 1.3 million Americans of working age have entered the workforce, even as the population of this same demographic increased by more than 2.8 million. Just over 1 million members of this group found jobs. That's right -- of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs.
The newspapers touted the reduction in the unemployment rate to 5.3 percent as a cause for celebration. Yet for every three Americans added to the working age population (16 and older), only around one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.
Here's the story the media didn't report. There are now more than 100 million Americans over the age of 16 that are not working. Usually when the economy picks up, American workers who have been laid off stampede back into the workforce to earn a paycheck. Now we have a better job market with fewer workers.
This is partially explained by baby boomers retiring. But the largest reduction in the workforce has been among the millennials. Today the labor force participation rate for the 16 to 24 age group is 55.1 percent, down from 60.8 percent a decade ago and more than 66 percent back in the late 1990s. We're headed toward becoming Greece, where half the young people don't work.