Monday, March 21, 2011

Check out Matthew Klein's Piece in NYTime Today

Matthew Klein's article dubbed "Educated, Unemployed, and Frustrated," describes the plight of American young people looking for a job and a future. He notes that 21 percent of workers between ages 16 to 24 are unemployed. These, of course, are mostly not college graduates, although Klein strongly suggests that they are in a typical NYTimes manner. The truth is that college grads have a very low unemployment rate, less than 5 percent in the aggregate, while non college grads have five times that number. Klein doesn't bother to ask why?

Klein does note the burden of entitlements which systematically favor age over youth, but that doesn't explain why young folks are struggling so in the job market, especially those without a college degree. Perhaps, he should look at some of the other editorials that grace the NY Times -- the ones that support employer mandates, the ones that suggest that all business folks are crooks, the ones that support higher taxes for employers, the ones that support Obamacare and other back breaking mandates on business, the ones that encourage frivolous lawsuits aimed at deep-pocket business when business is not really the offender, and on and on.

The answer is simple. We have priced these young folks out of the market. Who can afford to hire them. Not American business. The rest of the world, fortunately for them, unfortunately for us, does not load up employees with goodies that need to be financed by those who hire them (except in Europe, where young people face the same dismal future as our own). If you increase the price of something, people want less of it. Employees are no different than anything else.