Senate: Nearly a quarter of Americans ages 25-54 are not working


A chart released by the Senate Budget Committee found that nearly one in four of the 124.5 million Americans in prime working years between ages 25-54 are not working. The chart was created by the staff of Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) based on data from the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Sessions office explains:
There are 124.5 million Americans in their prime working years (ages 25–54). Nearly one-quarter of this group — 28.9 million people, or 23.2 percent of the total — is not currently employed. They either became so discouraged that they left the labor force entirely, or they are in the labor force but unemployed. This group of non-employed individuals is more than 3.5 million larger than before the recession began in 2007. [Weekly Standard]
Meanwhile, workers ages 18 to 29 are hit even harder by unemployment than older generations, with an unemployment rate more than twice the national average.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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