ME WORK? NO, I’D RATHER NOT …

Well, it would seem that Barry "Almighty" has been able to make great strides in his dogged determination to "fundamentally transform" America over the course of the last 6 years. And we seem to have now gotten to the point that has me wondering, even after gaining control of Congress and are lucky enough to win the White House in 2016, if we will ever be able to reverse any of, or very much of, what Barry has been able to set into motion.

And one of the issues that serves to point that out is the topic of my discussion here. The fact is that we now have nearly four in 10 Americans, or 92 million, who are no longer in the labor force. And the reason why is because they have simply given up and don’t really want to work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the largest group of people not in the labor force are those who don’t want a job, a rather remarkable statement on the nation’s work ethic.

The federal job counter said that 85.9 million adults last month didn’t want a job, or 93 percent of all adults not in the labor force. A Pew Research Center analysis out just today dug a bit deeper to find out exactly who those people might be. And come to find out it’s many of our younger Americans who seem far less interested, today, in landing a job than previous generations, possibly discouraged by the lack of good-paying jobs.

Pew said that 39 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t want to work, and that number is up from 29 percent back in 2000. And it’s courtesy of this analysis that we find out that it’s women who especially don’t want a job, although men have similar feelings. This Pew analysis said, "Women are more likely than men to say they don’t want a job, although the gap has been narrowing — especially since the Great Recession."

And it went on to say, "Last month, 28.5 percent of men said they didn’t want a job, up from 23.9 percent in October 2000 and 25.2 percent in October 2008. For women, the share saying they didn’t want a job hovered around 38 percent throughout the 2000s but began creeping up in 2010, reaching 40.2 percent last month." Should we be surprised by this? After all, how many times have we heard from Democrats that people shouldn’t have to work if they don’t ‘want’ to?