The ‘Idleness Rate’ for Young High-School Graduates Is 15.5%

WSJ reports:

For the majority of Americans, the years after high school are marked by entering the labor market or heading to college.

But about one out of every six recent high-school graduates got that diploma and went on to…nothing. That’s 1.4 million people ages 17 to 20 who are neither enrolled in a college or university, nor working. Instead of the unemployment rate, call it the idleness rate.

The figures are from a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, on the outlook for the Class of 2016. The EPI is a left-leaning think tank that supports an expanded safety net for young workers; the numbers in their report come directly from analyzing Labor Department data.

This can be directly attributed to minimum wage laws. Those with the lowest skill sets are the ones that will most likely generate a marginal revenue product lower than minimum wage rates so that it does not make sense for businesses to hire them.

The lefty solution is, of course, not to eliminate the minimum wage so that these young graduates can get that all important first job, but to coddle them and provide them with a government "safety net."

The safety net does nothing but teach these graduates to look to the government for "solutions."  Solutions which are counter-productive to a healthy economy and do nothing but encourage these students to live off government handouts, instead of becoming productive members of society,
 -RW