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The fundamental error is supposing there's some huge reserve of able-bodied but idle people sitting around. Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high. Most of the people who don't have a job have a good reason for it (e.g. caretaking, education, age, disability) or are looking for one.
Why is it wonderful? I actually don't think Trump's base voted for a plan to make everyone so poor we have to flog the elderly and disabled back on the assembly line.
As @Primaprimaprima observes, I think a moral judgment towards those unwilling or too lazy to support themselves is one of the distinguishing features of Tea-Party/MAGA right. That there is dignity and virtue in hard work and doing the needful but dirty job. That the slothful degenerate should be either pittied or whipped into shape rather than catered to. The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" are real and walk among us.
Also, it seems I have been blocked by this user. That's news to me.
So I fully agree with that on principle. There were two generations of overly soft parents that lead to a reasonable number of sociopathic moochers.
But living in a prosperous and high-trust society without degenerating into sloth, that's a core piece of what makes anglo civilization worthwhile. Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.
The dissidents already believe that half of the political spectrum has effectively forbade the American public from ever reinforcing those values, what is your solution to that?
One parent refuses to teach the child not to scoop the butter off the butter dish and eat it.
The other decides that everyone must go without butter.
What is to be done?
The other parent presumably believes that going without butter will force the first parent to work towards actualizing responsibility instead of whinging when told to do what they need to do.
Do I think this is realistic or practical? Not really, but that is the framing you are fighting.
Not only is it not realistic or practical, the goal is to have a house in which there is butter. Fixing the problem by removing the butter only gets us further from that goal.
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Overall lfpr is in the dumps right now. No idea where to find "prime age" lfpr but some links would be nice.
Found some fred data:
The overall participation rate is doing ok, but not majorly changing recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 But something is wrong, the line goes up way too much before 2000.
Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025
And by doing ok, you mean nearing all-time highs?
When you take out retirees and students it looks much less dramatic, and even in the 25-54 bracket per some mercatus paper I can't find now even a substantial portion thereof is early retirees. Especially given that the figures for men have been stable post-GFC, it hardly seems like something worth crashing the economy over.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Hv9x
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The population is getting older and more people are going to college.
FRED would be good place to start: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
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