Stephen Moore: If young people want more affordability, they should get jobs

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Polls show that the age group of Americans most worried about “affordability” is the 20- and 30-somethings. That’s young millennials and Gen Z.

Why are they so financially stressed out? One reason things seem so unaffordable to young people is that too many aren’t working hard — they are hardly working.

The latest Labor Department data indicate that fewer and fewer males between the ages of 16 and 24 are in the labor force. It used to be that more than 70% had a job; now, less than 60% do.

Labor force participation for men, even into their 30s, is at or near an all-time low. Men without jobs are a prescription for social chaos.

I would argue this is the MOST important age for a man to be hard at work, honing his job skills and on the way to a career that makes him a suitable marriage partner. Marriage rates for young men are down as well. Their lack of work experience and a successful career trajectory is one major reason why.

The earlier in life that men (and women) start working, the more successful they are likely to be in their careers, and the higher their lifetime earnings will be.

Getting young people into the workforce is critical to solving so many of our societal problems. How can tuition, groceries, health care, and housing be affordable when so many aren’t earning a paycheck?

Solving this problem will require a societal/cultural shift. Parents need to encourage their high school and especially college kids to work 10 to 20 hours a week. Watching TV and playing video games, or even being a bookworm, is no path to success.

Our labor laws at the federal and state levels have done a great disservice by keeping teens out of the workforce. Child labor laws and minimum wage requirements keep young people out of the labor market. Every city and state should have a teen minimum wage of no more than $5 an hour. The skills that one earns on their first job are invaluable later in life.

We need a new ethic that every college student should be working up to 20 hours a week while they are in school, in lieu of taking out as much as $100,000 in loans subsidized by taxpayers.

This is a win-win for everyone: Colleges would have to lower their outrageous tuition. Kids would learn real-life skills while in school. And we could eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt that is often defaulted on.

The college student loan program should be eliminated and replaced by a student work program.

I have long touted the College of the Ozarks model: The tuition is free, but every student pays for college by working 20 hours a week at a job, learning life skills. These are some of the most impressive students I’ve met in my visits to dozens of top universities. If the kids pay for the tuition themselves, they value it far more. As the old saying goes, anything easily attained is lightly regarded.

This would also be a good way to get rid of the snowflake mentality of college kids sitting in their “safe spaces” and acting as though they have a constitutional right to never be offended. With a job, they will be quickly disabused of that idea the first time they show up for work and get chewed out by their boss.

Work is hard. Work pays the bills. Work is a virtue. The earlier in life kids learn that lesson, the better — for them and for the rest of us.

Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity, which advocates for education freedom for all children.

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Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore is an economics journalist, author, and columnist who served as the senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page and as member of the Journal's editorial board.