Why, Leftists wonder, are people leaving the work force? Well, duh.

  Gee, for some reason, people have left the work force in this country. Liberals can't figure out why. The Washington Post has an article today, puzzling about the "mystery" of the declining work force.

  Extended unemployment, easy welfare payments that can be used anywhere including Colorado strip clubs, and huge numbers swelling the "disability" rolls are only suggestions from "conservative" think tanks like Heritage. 

  You'll note in the following excerpts that liberal think tanks think the solution to this problem is "improving job opportunities," which is part of the latest liberal meme to force pizza workers and burger flippers to pay its entry level workers more. Note also that "we" have to "get them involved."

  Thus the dramatic strikes in NYC with the usual union-paid sad faced workers posing for the cameras with their unionist "I am a man" signs. Big eyes. Sad face. Look, my pockets are empty. Could we please have some plaintive music to go along with the Norman Rockwell?

  Here are some nuggets from the WaPo article entitled "Vanishing work force weighs on growth."

“Prime-aged people are working less, and we don’t know why,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist and associate professor at the University of Michigan. “I get concerned because there are a lot of people who have useful and productive skills that could really contribute to the economy, and we’re just failing to find ways to get them involved.” 

The easiest explanation for vanishing prime-aged workers is the weak job market: The economy just isn’t creating enough new jobs to keep job-seekers engaged, so many of them are getting frustrated and abandoning their search for work. 

In order to pull people back into the workforce, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, “it’s going to take seriously improving job opportunities, and that hasn’t happened yet.” 

Some researchers are making headway in explaining where people go when they leave the workforce. The conservative Heritage Foundation did a study last year that found that most of the people who left between 2007 and 2011 ended up in one of two places: They went to school, or they went on disability. The researchers expect the students to eventually return, but not the workers on disability, said James Sherk, Heritage’s senior policy analyst in labor economics.

  Now going to school also means there will be more student loans for majors like social justice, which means more agitation for "equality" which means taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive. 
  Which again gets us back to the same problem, doesn't it?
  The student debt problem is about to explode, surpassing the mortgage loan crisis in size and depth.
  And the enormous surge to flood the disability rolls is truly disabling this country. Almost nine million people are on disability in this country where workers actually drawing a paycheck for doing something has dropped to the lowest rate in years. 
  That rate is 13 workers paying for every person on disability, not to mention the other "social justice" payments folks receive. CNS:

This is the 192^nd straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments has increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. That month the number of workers taking disability dropped by 249 people—from 4,385,623 in December 1996 to 4,385,374 in January 1997. 

As the overall number of Americans collecting disability has increased, the ratio of full-time workers to disability beneficiaries has decreased.

  In England where disability and welfare payments have been free and easy for years, they actually decided to make the "disabled" go to the doctor to prove their disability and guess what. Almost a million people--3 out of 4 on disability--were knocked off.
  So Jonah Goldberg asks, "Is Disability the New Welfare?" 
  And let's be honest about this. It's not a matter of "compassion" as so many Leftists claim to keep people on welfare/government subsidies.
  An excellent case of the dire results of the culture of welfare is playing out in England where the horrendous Mick Philpott, in an attempt to garner more welfare payments and sympathy, set his house on fire, burning alive 6 of the 17 children living in the house. (Details can be found here.) Over 50 years, Philpott had gamed the system, never having held a job and yet acquiring the US equivalent of over $150,000 a year in government subsidies.
  Former welfare recipient Star Parker has an excellent testimony concerning the dangers of government dependency. You can read about her here.