The president famed for his “grab ‘em by the p***y” comment, and who just banned visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries, may need to get much friendlier with women and immigrants.
A new analysis says the only way President Donald Trump can meet his job-creation goal is to increase the U.S.’s rate of immigration or encourage more women to join the workforce.
In a statement on the White House website, President Donald Trump announced “a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.”
But the analysis from the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) says there's an obstacle to reaching such a fast rate of job growth in America: The share of Americans who are in the workforce is shrinking, meaning there are fewer young people coming into the workforce to replace aging people.
In the post-war decades in which the Baby Boomers grew up, this wasn’t a problem because — even though workforce participation for men was already falling — women were entering the workforce, more than making up the difference.
But U.S. women’s workforce participation peaked in the 1990s and has been slowly declining. That, coupled with an aging population, limits how quickly the U.S. economy can grow and create jobs, ECRI said.
“Absent the demographics the U.S. used to enjoy in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – and without a dramatic surge in immigration or the number of women joining the labor force – it will be virtually impossible for any president to add 25 million jobs in the next eight years,” ECRI concluded.
The U.S. isn’t alone in dealing with this problem; it’s even more acute in countries with slow or no population growth.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than one million Middle Eastern refugees into the country was based partly on the argument that Germany has a desperate need for younger workers.