Slacker Nation: 793,000 File Initial Unemployment Claims; 20 Million Jobless; 150 Million Idle Americans

Here's the trouble with getting a job: You might lose it.

That's the reality 793,000 people reportedly ran into last week, as Americans continue to seek money from the government rather than work in either the private or public sectors.

And, that's the seasonally-adjusted number. The non-adjusted figure came in higher, at 813,145. What's troubling about these initial claims is that it appears some people were accepting unemployment back in March, at the beginning of the COVID crisis, went back to work, but have fallen out of employment again.

What else can explain the roughly 40-50 million initial claims filed from the end of March 2020 to the present, a run approaching a full calendar year. The number of people filing initial claims was as high as seven million, which occurred in March, at the onset of the pandemic. New weekly claims didn't fall below one million until August, and they've remained high - between 700,000 and 950,000 - ever since.

Averaged out, it's close to a million initial filings every week for about 46 weeks, so, overall, 46 million people filed since COVID-19 came along, which is stunning, as the US labor market is somewhere in the neighborhood of 145 million. Rouhgly a third of the entire labor market filed for unemployment in the past year. That's downright scary.

The latest press release from the Department of Labor [PDF] is a treasure trove of information, for whatever useful or useless purpose one may reference the data.

Another shocking number is the continuing claims figure, which jumped by 2,596,539 from the prior week, to 20,435,018. That's 20 million people aimlessly wandering around, not working, doing whatever unproductive people do.

Add to these figures, about 73 million kids under the age of 18, 13 million on welfare, another 45 million retirees, and you have over 150 million people in the US not doing much of anything, many of them receiving government checks on a regular basis. That's in a population of 330 million, so close to half of the country is not gainfully employed.

One may argue that the kids and the retired folks shouldn't be working anyway, but back in the formative years of the United States - well before child labor laws - it wasn't unusual for 10 and 12-year-olds to work, at least doing chores of the family farm. And retirement at any age didn't really become the norm until passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. As we used to say in the newspaper business: "we don't have a retirement plan; you're expected to work until you keel over at your desk."

So, one might add up all the reasons why the United States isn't quite as high and mighty as it once may have been, but anyone can point to the fact that much of the country's population doesn't do much, and, those in government jobs (20.2 million, approximately 14.5 percent of the workforce) may actually be doing work that contributes negatively to the growth of the nation, it's easy to see that America has become a nation of slackers.

Carry on... whatever it is that you're doing, or not doing.

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