Average number "Not in labor force" aged 25-54
1999: 18.785 million
2019: 22.102 million
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+3.317 million after 20 years, despite recent declines
The last 20 years have been a disaster for American workers with Bush and Obama outsourcing good middle class jobs to cheaper labor markets around the world, especially China.
Trump was supposed to fix this, and now he's parroting the arguments of the people he ran against.
It's pitiful and awful.
Watch Ingraham grill Trump here. Unfortunately Laura's command of the data is merely derivative and shallow, which leaves her simply to argue against Trump that he didn't campaign on bringing in foreign labor, which is an excellent political point by itself, but she didn't own the president on this one the way she could have with the facts. She's smart enough to understand that lack of wage pressure refutes the idea of a labor shortage, but didn't dig deeper to find the surplus labor.
