Hidden in the shadows and forgotten: That’s the only way to describe the state of male employment in this country. The percentage of men aged 25-54 who report working at all has fallen from almost 100 in the 1950s to about 90 today. If 90% doesn’t sound so bad, consider that it’s comparable to the share of American men working in 1940, at the tail end of the Great Depression.
That’s right: The Biden-Harris economy is the Great Depression for men. And it’s made worse by another unavoidable stat: higher costs. Even before the most recent spike in inflation, caused by Biden-Harris policies, the median male worker could no longer provide a middle-class lifestyle for his family. The number of weeks he would need to work to pay for that lifestyle rose from 40 in 1985 to 62 in 2022, which is far more weeks than exist in a year.
On Labor Day 2023, I documented these trends in a report detailing the decades-long decline of the fortunes of working men. This year, the Biden-Harris administration claims to have orchestrated a dramatic comeback for men. But the administration’s evidence is little more than a sleight of hand, and unfortunately, the challenges men face remain as formidable as ever.
Virtually all Americans, whether they are liberal, conservative or somewhere in between, recognize these challenges are a problem. But the Biden-Harris administration’s response has been to merely pretend the problem away.
White House press releases claim the president and vice president have revitalized American manufacturing, sparked a historic economic recovery, and even chipped away at the share of men without work. Look a layer deeper, though, and it’s clear these claims are just window dressing.
Manufacturing employment, contrary to what the White House’s boosterish rhetoric implies, flatlined and then decreased last year, and manufacturing job quality is down. Moreover, the administration has hamstrung its own industrial policies by catering to green-energy special interests and progressive social agendas.
Meanwhile, as recently as July, real hourly wages were lower than they were when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in 2021. And to top it off, the spin from Biden and Harris has been based on faulty numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics radically overestimated this year’s total employment: Its most recent revision found the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than previously maintained.
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What of specifically male employment? The White House declared in August that “the sharp recovery after the Pandemic Recession has brought prime-age men’s LFPR [labor force participation rate] above its pre-pandemic level.” This would be cause for celebration if not for the White House’s omission of a key fact: The cited “recovery” comes almost entirely from immigration.
Employment of native-born Americans, women as well as men, is actually 208,000 below its pre-pandemic level. And at the end of 2023, U.S.-born men without a college degree were less likely to participate in the labor force than they were before the pandemic. As I wrote earlier this year, this is the result of deliberate policy decisions: the “willful failure to secure the southern border and misguided expansion of immigration programs.” Healing our communities? Hardly.
There are real steps our government can take to improve the fortunes of working-age men. These include doubling down on pro-American industrial policies (e.g., by expanding tariffs on Chinese-made goods), since manufacturing has traditionally been a mainstay of American men’s employment.
They include promoting vocational training in high schools, since the high school-to-college pathway disproportionately fails young men, while skilled-trade apprenticeships tend to improve men’s future life outcomes. They also include eliminating marriage penalties in the tax code, because married men earn more and report far greater happiness than do their unmarried peers.
The Biden-Harris administration, however, appears uninterested in taking any of these steps. Instead, our current leaders paint over the problems of working-age men with misleading statistics and a tidal wave of low-wage, often illegal, immigrants. This undermines their own pro-manufacturing, pro-worker rhetoric. Meanwhile, millions of native-born men continue to work underpaid jobs or, worse, languish without jobs at all.
For our society, the consequences of this are catastrophic. The fact that the male suicide rate has exceeded 23 people per 100,000, one of the highest such rates in our history, can’t be explained without it. If we want America to remain strong for the long, difficult century ahead, we must chart a different course. For no nation can long survive without strong men.