Carney: U.S. Does Not Have a Labor Shortage; It Has a Wage Shortage

President Donald Trump is right. America needs more workers.

But if his advisers are telling him that this means America needs higher levels of immigration, they are misleading the president. America does not need to import workers. We have plenty of potential workers who were sidelined by the Great Recession and globalization.

In the first two years of the Trump presidency, America created two million jobs. The unemployment level fell to an astonishing 3.7 percent in September, the lowest level in decades, and it has averaged 4 percent over the past year.

The official unemployment rate, however, only includes Americans looking for work. It overlooks more than 90 million Americans who are officially out of the labor force. The civilian labor force participation rate is now just 63.2 percent—down from more than 66 percent prior to the Great Recession.

Even when adjusted for America’s aging workforce and more working-age Americans attending college, participation is low. Just 82.6 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 were counted in the labor force, according to the most recent figures from the Department of Labor. That’s a full percentage point lower than it was in the late 1990s, the last time unemployment was this low:

In his recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Fed chair Jerome Powell called the low level of labor force participation a “very troubling concern.”

“There are lots of people, millions of people, who are out of the labor force and in a perfect world, in a better world, would be in the labor force,” Powell said. “We want the economy to grow, and we want that prosperity to be widely spread. Labor force participation gets both of those things almost better than anything.”

President Trump knows that millions of Americans are out of work. In his first address to a joint session of Congress in February 2017, Trump said, “We must honestly acknowledge the circumstances we inherited. Ninety-four million Americans are out of the labor force.”

To be sure, since the election, we’ve made some progress in drawing Americans back into the labor force. More than 2.1 million people joined the labor force in 2018. The participation rate is up a full percentage point compared with a year ago, as is the participation rate among those prime working age Americans between 25 and 54.

But wage growth has lagged behind expectations and historical levels. Average hourly earnings grew 3.2 percent in 2018. After adjusting for inflation, that amounted to an increase of just 1.7 percent.

Compare that with the 4.2 percent average wage growth right back in 2001—when the workforce participation rate was higher than 66 percent.

Full article: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2019/03/07/carney-u-s-does-not-have-labor-shortage-has-wage-shortage/

I am a farmer in California once one of the largest now reduced to family farming (By choice) . This is a big argument with the farmers we always paid above going wages every single farmer I know in California are multi millionaires who won't pay their workers working wages…They also snuff out the smaller farmers