The Jobless Rate for Poor Black Teen Dropouts is 95%

I found myself wondering about this as well. Some of this is quite likely legitimate unemployment, but I'm wondering what percent is laziness.

That said, it's pretty easy as a middle-income white guy to cast judgement on people living in a situation I can't even dream of understanding. This is a pretty complex subject.

There is no market demand for unskilled labor at $7.25 an hour. Even if you removed minimum wage laws, you would still need to pay people enough to eat and stay functional in the workplace, which nowadays I imagine isn't much lower than $7.25, especially considering the only practical unskilled labor roles today are physical toiling, since almost everything else can be very easily automated away, so you need to fix their broken bones.

So I'd argue the open market in the US don't have enough demand for physical human labor at the bare minimum cost to keep people alive. The consequence is a lot of people are just not working. We have nothing for them to do at the given price that anyone is willing to pay.

So if the market has no unmet demands for toil, then guaranteeing a minimum wage job means you are wasting that persons time on some task that nobody needs done, at least not for the price he is paid, and you are not only biasing away the labor market you are wasting that persons time on some task that isn't valuable to be done.

Even if you have some market demand, the given rate is dropping annually due to the cheaper and more efficient automation of physical duties. I guarantee you once automated vehicles are entering the market and are legally allowed, there will be an absurd displacement of menial labor driving delivery trucks.

Other industries rife for that kind of displacement are farming (considering most farming tasks are procedural, automated farming machinery is practical, even if it needs high precision to harvest using computer vision), retail (with automated vehicles, you might as well buy all your goods online, shipped directly to your home, with no need for an intermediary store except in rare conditions like furniture and cars where you want to "sample" in person the goods), and construction (if you plant factory made homes, might as well build a foundation machine to excavate and lay a foundation without human intervention).

And then you have no use for human meat sacks moving their arms. We are already approaching that - it is why this problem even exists today. What happens when we get there?

The countries with the highest minimum wages are the democratic socialist states of Europe which all have much higher youth unemployment rates than here. One of the lowest youth unemployment rates in Europe is Germany, which has no minimum wage law.

This seems like another argument for Basic Income. A lot of young, jobless people (males especially) isn't only a moral problem, but it's a sociological problem. The young jobless commit more crimes, are more likely to join gangs and are generally more of a drain on society. Giving them an income would remove the social pressure to constantly look for jobs that aren't actually there. People could focus on internships and other productive activities without having to resort to selling drugs to make a living.

Short of full on Basic Income, we could at least continue a much larger version of the government teen jobs program mentioned in the article. Money given to low income youth tends to find it's way back into the economy quickly. Much of the money from a government jobs program would be spent at the mall or walmart, some of which would end up in the hands of vendors and suppliers, which could get spent on apps and web services run by hn users. In short, poor people don't save a lot. Some percentage of our tax money will come back to us.

Capitalism is a great system, but it isn't perfect. The best predictor of future income is parental income. Direct action is the best way to break the cycle.

Are you saying that the high school dropout rate is 1%? Because that's not anywhere close to being correct. It's over 25% in the United States according to this: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/high-sch...