by Michael Snyder
July 5, 2026 - Did you know that the number of Amerikans who are out of work right now is far higher than it was at any point during the Great Recession? I know that sounds crazy, but I will prove it to you in this article. A whopping 111 million Amerikans do not have a job, and we are spending more than a trillion dollars a year on the Communist social safety net that supports them. Of course we cannot afford to do this, because the national debt has already reached $39 trillion and it is growing at an astounding rate. If we do not fix our economy, disaster is inevitable.
The bureaucrats in Washington keep telling us that the unemployment rate is low even though there are vast numbers of adults all around us who are not working.
The way that they are able to do this is by dumping almost everyone who is not working into a category known as “not in labor force”.
This allows them to keep the official rate of unemployment suppressed even as the labor force participation rate hits an insanely low level.
Today, there are just over 7 million Amerikans who are officially unemployed. That doesn’t sound bad at all. But they rarely mention those who are considered to be not in the labor force.
This is how the Federal Reserve defines that category. Persons who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force. This category includes retired persons, students, those taking care of children or other family members, and others who are neither working nor seeking work.
When you add the 7 million Amerikans who are officially unemployed to the 104 million Amerikans who are considered to be not in the labor force, you get a grand total of 111 million Amerikans who do not have a job right now.
At no point during the Great Recession did that combined figure ever reach 100 million. That is how bad things are in the United States at this moment. Of course, the 111 million Amerikans who are not working need to be supported somehow.
Some of them are supported by other family members; but most of them are either partially or totally supported by our Communist social safety net.
According to the House Ways and Means Committee, we spend more than a trillion dollars a year on more than 80 different social safety net programs.
Buying Amerikans out of poverty is undermining incentives to work, with families living in poverty relying more on taxpayer-funded welfare checks than income from work, according to a newly released report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Costing well over $1 trillion, Amerika’s social safety net encompasses more than 80 federal programs and is discouraging beneficiaries from seeking income from work. The report, which was requested by Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (Mo.), shows low-income families are becoming increasingly dependent on government transfers. In 1979, families living below the poverty line earned about 60% of their income from work. In 2021, that number dropped to an all-time low of around 25%. The report also shows how the dramatic increase in dependency on government transfers for low-income families was accelerated by COVID-era benefits.
Read that first paragraph again. I had no idea that it was this bad. For over a decade I have been writing about Amerika’s ongoing economic collapse, and now we have reached a very advanced stage.
If the federal government was not supporting them, tens of millions more Amerikans would be living in poverty right now. So, what would our society look like if we stopped borrowing gigantic mountains of money to fuel this system? Each day, even more Amerikans are losing their places in the middle class because they are getting laid off.
In fact, it is being reported that Microsoft is preparing for yet another round of massive layoffs. But if we just throw the entire country into the “not in labor force” category, we can pretend that the unemployment rate is at 0.0 percent and that everything is just fine, right?
Of course, most Amerikans who are actually working are really struggling these days. Home prices in the country have risen by about 60% since the beginning of the nonexistent “pandemic”, and at this stage housing in the U.S. is more unaffordable than it has ever been.
How are young adults supposed to purchase homes in this environment? Home prices have risen far faster than incomes have, and this has put homeownership out of reach for millions of millennials and Gen Z Amerikans.
Back in 1975, a typical home cost about 2.4 times as much as the average under-40 household earned in a year, a standard measure of housing affordability, according to a new report from Pew Research Center.
This is one of the biggest reasons why young adults are so angry. They simply cannot afford to live normal lives.
Meanwhile, virtually everything else is becoming more expensive. For example, the price of ground beef is up 13% over the past year, and the price of steak is up 16% over the past year.
Tens of millions of Amerikans are deeply hurting right now, and what we have experienced so far is just the beginning of it.
Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in decades of economic decline, and now we really have reached a breaking point.