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Friday 20 November 2009
Tax the Rich

Ten percent of Americans are unemployed, and many doubt that President Obama’s stimulus will create enough jobs to reduce this rate significantly. But given the structure of our labor force, more jobs is not necessarily what we need anyway. Our workforce includes 13.5 million people who don’t belong in it at all. Permitting them not to work would free up jobs and raise the wages of millions of workers who belong in the middle class. It would also free all of us of our dependence on Wall Street.

Currently, four million children under the age of eighteen work, filling the equivalent of two million full time jobs. (The actual number is higher. Even though the law permits the employment of children over the age of fourteen, the Census Bureau only collects data about workers who are older than sixteen.) Ten million college-age youth (between the ages of eighteen and twenty one) also work, and they fill the equivalent of eight million full time jobs. Five million of these college-age youth do not attend college at all. Finally, there are also four and a half million workers who are sixty six years or older, and they fill the equivalent of three and a half million full time jobs. The questions before us are then: Should these workers be removed from the workforce? How much would this cost? Can we afford it? And finally, what will our lives look like after all these workers stop working?

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